Nightwing Extreme
by G0REL0RD
Summary: Blüdhaven is overrun by an unprecedented crime wave caused by an ascent to power of a new mysterious crime lord that takes control over the entire city, when a new young vigilante suddenly appears on the horizon, intent upon putting an end to the new kingpin's unlawful reign and also proving to the whole world that he can be an independent hero without anybody else's help. Ch4 up!
1. Chapter 1: Dark as Night

_Greetings to everyone viewing this story!_

 _This is the third work that I'm posting here, the previous two being novelizations of "Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver" and "Oddworld: Abe's Oddysee". Until starting this fic, I've been only into novelizing some of my favorite video games, but I always wanted to give a story based on some comic book character a shot as well because I'm a big fan of comics, especially, of the ones from 'DC' universe. The reason I didn't muster the courage do something like this earlier is because my English (this is not my first language) and my writing style were still in development and I didn't really feel ready to start a project of such a scale. Actually, I'm still in process of working on my writing skills, but after more than 3 years of practice, I feel like I'm finally up for the challenge. Whether I succeeded or not is up to you to decide._

 _As far 'Nightwing Extreme' is concerned, this is my own universe which I created on the basis of some classic plots and storylines taken out of various comic books, video games, cartoons and movies dedicated to Nightwing, only pulled through the prism of my own imagination. All the DC-characters you gonna encounter throughout this series will be canon, but the twists and turns I'm going to give them will be my own vision. I'll be trying to keep as many details from the most famous plots as possible, but I cannot include everything into this work, due to a vast number of many bipolar, contradicting storylines created throughout the whole history of the character's existence. Because of that, I kindly ask you not to torment me with geeky comments like "This is not how it was in New 52..." or "You screwed up the storyline from Issue #19" and more like this. I'm always open to constructive criticism and I always welcome recommendations and suggestions, but please, don't start being overly nerdy. Other that his, I really hope you're going to enjoy my take on the story of Nightwing._

 _And, as always, I can't help but say: please read and review! I'm taking this work very seriously and want to maintain a certain level of quality, so it's really important for me to receive feedback that will help me make this story as awesome as possible. Not to mention, reviews always make a big part of my motivation and inspiration to write._

 _Thank you for your attention, and now, onward with 'Nightwing Extreme'!_

 _ **Disclaimer:** I do NOT own Nightwing, Batman, Robin, Teen Titans or any other DC-characters mentioned in this work. They are the property of DC Comics. I'm making $0,00 from this story, I'm just an avid comic book fan who wants to share some of his literary ideas with other people. Please don't sue._

* * *

 **Chapter 1: Dark as Night**

Life seemed to die away each time the blanket of night would fall upon the city of Blüdhaven. The streets at once became deserted, the people that appeared to have been carelessly walking them in the daylight suddenly starting to nervously hurry back to their homes to lock themselves there until the next day's morning came. Even those who had no homes to return to knew better than to stay outdoors at such a late hour and would quickly find some deep corners where the veil of darkness could shelter them from the many dangers that the streets of Blüdhaven were filled with at this time. Over the past several years, crime rate in this city had reached critical proportions, and now no one living here could feel completely safe anymore.

For fairness sake, criminal situation in Blüdhaven had never really known good times. Numerous failed attempts on the part of its public authorities to turn this former whaling town into a large manufacturing and shipping center only succeeded in further deteriorating the city's economic environment, thus creating a huge breeding ground for increase of crime wave. Also, being an overshadowed neighbor to the famous and prominent city of Gotham which was protected by the vigilante Batman and the team of his sidekicks, Blüdhaven had always been some sort of a 'reserve airfield' to those criminals that would fail to find their fortune in Gotham. Drug-dealers, mobsters and other criminal elements were eagerly coming to this town, inspired by the absence of any masked heroes to stand in their way here. The local police forces represented little impediment to their ambition because the law enforcement system in Blüdhaven had long since drowned in endemic corruption. Cops were bought by public officials who, in their turn, were bought by members of organized crime syndicates. Of course, it wasn't that Blüdhaven was completely without any honest policemen or judges. But like in almost every other crime-consumed city, such unlikely individuals were usually the first ones to be shot right in their faces.

Still, even with all those disheartening factors taken into account, there was still no solid explanation for the recent unprecedented outburst of lawlessness in Blüdhaven. If just a couple of years ago Blüdhaven was an ordinary town with high level of crime where it was simply safer not to walk in the streets at night, now this city had begun to turn into a place where it was safer to not live in at all. Drugs were sold on every street corner. Thefts, robberies and burglaries raged all around the town. Innocent citizens were getting murdered every day. Police and justice were corrupted to the core. The very name 'Blüdhaven' was slowly turning into a common noun for a pandemonium of crime. The city's populace was gradually growing extinct with its residents doing everything they could to save enough money and leave this pit of hell and the visitors from other cities and states not even conceding the mere idea of coming to live here. Nobody understood how the state of affairs in Blüdhaven could have taken such a drastic change from simply 'bad' to 'worse than ever', but at this point, this understanding hardly made any difference anymore.

Many believed that the recent dramatic debasement of life in Blüdhaven had to do with the rumored overthrow of the city's former crime lord, Angel Marin. On the face of it, a mob kingpin controlling the entire city getting dethroned at last was supposed to be a good thing. But that was only unless his place was taken by someone far worse than him. Nobody knew the name of this new criminal master to have superseded Marin, but if the recent swing of things in Blüdhaven was any indication, this man was a far bigger of the two evils. Blüdhaven might have always been far from being trouble-free, but never before had the crime in this city been so much out of control. Disregard of the law had become like some cancerous tumor feeding off this city, and at the rate things were going, this infection would soon spread far beyond Blüdhaven's borders. Someone needed to stop it, but with the entire local public order bribed and oppressed, who in the world could that someone possibly be?

The answer to this question came on one fateful night.

It was late autumn in Blüdhaven. Days were getting shorter and nights were getting longer. And just as always, when darkness came, the city's streets quickly emptied out. Shops, stores, supermarkets, cafes, restaurants, movie theatres – everything became closed the very instant the sun dipped below the horizon. The owners of those places were completely careless of the potential extra profit they could lose by calling it a day this early. Everybody just followed their instinct for self-preservation, having only their own personal safety on their mind. Therefore, by the time it was 10:00 PM, Blüdhaven's panoramic view already resembled some of those ravaged post-apocalyptic cities they usually showed in zombie horror movies where the entire population was utterly wiped out by living dead monsters. The only things to give away that the town was not completely dead were the lights shining through the dwelling houses' windows and some occasional police sirens ringing here and there. When the city fell asleep, its crime woke up, and it stayed awoke until the next day's sunrise dispersed it.

That night, though, was not just like any other night in Blüdhaven. Whereas the rampancy of crime had long since become something Blüdhaven's night life was simply unimaginable without, recently the iniquity taking place here had reached an entirely new level. This was no longer about just some ordinary violent crimes and property crimes committed by street punks under the cover of darkness. In their constantly growing sense of impunity, the local gangsters decided to cross the line they could never even dream of crossing before. That line was an attempted robbery of Blüdhaven Bank.

Regardless of how debilitated was the criminal situation in Blüdhaven, robbing a local bank here or in any other civilized city for this matter could seem as stupid as it was it was pointless. Banks by their very nature were the kind of places that were protected like no other institutions, and even if someone could theoretically have the strength and resources to take out all bank security guards and avoid the numerous anti-intrusion alarm systems, without the knowledge of means of progressing past the whole multitude of various identification systems and electronic control panels that provided access to the bank vault, the effort was pretty much foredoomed. Blüdhaven might have been downtrodden, but it lived in the same age of advanced technologies and computer progress as the whole world around it, where brute force couldn't always be a solution to everything. But then again, the criminals operating in the city weren't always relying just on their muscles either.

The night the bank robbery took place, very few people in Blüdhaven could have any idea what was really going on there. The Bank's exterior façade with its two golden life-sized lions standing on their individual pedestals either side of the building's entry door and a large golden 'B' letter placed within a circle frame above it looked completely innocuous from outside. No strange people could be seen hanging around the building. No sounds of any brawls or gun-fights could be heard. No alarms were ringing and no police cars were rushing to the Bank. Everything seemed peaceful and quiet. However, that outer quietness was only a cloak to what was actually transpiring within the walls of the Bank.

Inside the building, the entire bank security was lying unconscious all over the place, bound and gagged by their ambushers. The alarms, as well as other anti-intrusion systems were deactivated and silent. The numerous heavy bulletproof armored doors blocking the way to the bank vault were all open, allowing a gang of masked armed-to-the-teeth thugs that were the very ones mobbing this place right now to unceremoniously access the room where all the valuable assets of the Bank's customers were stored. The way how smoothly and carelessly they were handling their task gave a serious reason to doubt whether banks really were as effectively protected as they were believed to be. Either those robbers were high-caliber professionals or there was something else at work here that had ensured their success.

Before it was even midnight, the mobsters were almost done penetrating their way into the bank vault. Only the last steel-reinforced door remained separating them from their target, but unlike all the previous doors which electronic access systems they had managed to hack, this one was not supplied with any automatic locks. While the alarm protecting it was already disarmed, opening a 3.5 feet thick door required some raw power which the robbers had been avoiding to use all along. However, the criminals turned out to be more than equipped to handle that challenge too as one of them took out some advanced laser-like device from his backpack and started melting the door's steel surface with it. This was going relatively slow, but with all the guards knocked out senseless and no stir having been made so far, time was something those robbers had aplenty.

As the one with the laser continued doing his part, the others continued walking around the place with their weapons at the ready, keeping ward of the captive security and making sure nothing happened that would put their operation in jeopardy. Over time, though, it became clear that the quiet atmosphere of this crime site would hardly be violated anytime soon, and the robbers relaxed a bit, starting to do some small talk with each other.

"Man, this is almost too easy!" one of them smirked. "I couldn't have even dreamt of robbing a bank like this back when I was still in Gotham!"

"Me neither," another one agreed. "That Bat-freak with his snot-nosed goons wouldn't have even allowed us to get close to any of their dampers."

"Yeah. Luckily, no costumed clowns can touch us here, in Blüdhaven. This city is ours!" the first one declared jubilantly.

The two thugs shared a good laugh then, which was quickly caught by the rest of their friends idling around nearby. Then another one joined their conversation.

"Guys, guys, let us not attribute everything only to absence of Batman and his vigilante punks on our way," he took the word. "I mean, what would we do without the help of our 'right friend in the right place'? Am I right, Joey?" he referred to another masked mobster standing next to him and slightly punched him in the shoulder in a friendly gesture.

The rest of the gangsters hurried to shower that Joey guy with more cries of approval as well, but the praised thug didn't seem to enjoy the ovation and even appeared discomforted by this kind of attention to his persona.

"Hey, would you please quit kidding around at a time like this!" he brushed aside, sounding almost annoyed. "The operation isn't over yet!"

"Ooh, look who's nervous," the thug that had started the whole conversation taunted him. "Isn't that someone who's afraid of losing his job at this place?"

That comment sent a wave of chuffy laughter among the entire gang, making Joey awkwardly jolt on his place with fright.

"Quiet you idiot!" Joey hushed at him. "What if one of the guards hears you?"

"What did you call me, you two-faced slimeball?!" his interlocutor snarled back at him and already made a harsh move forward as if looking to start a fight.

However, he was quickly restrained by the criminal that had brought up the subject.

"Shut the hell up, both of you!" he attempted to stroke his partners down, still holding back the one that was desperately trying to get his hands on Joey. "Now is neither the time, nor the place for this!"

The restrained thug made a couple more attempts to break free from his friend's grip, but then calmed down, though still looking aggressive. As the dust settled a bit, the one to have taken it upon himself to defuse the conflict resumed the dialogue.

"Easy there, Lance, no need to be rude here," he said loyally, his voice, though, still emanating with cynicism. "It's not like it's his fault that he doesn't get paid enough for providing security services to such an important and serious institution, right?"

The robber whose name appeared to be Lance just straightened his messed leather jacket and scoffed derisively,

"Whatever. Not my problem that the guy chose to become a rat and is now being chicken about it."

This time it was Joey's turn to snap as he crustily approached Lance after his acrid comment and pointed a pistol right at his gang-mate's face.

"You know, maybe I should really switch back to my primary duties and blow out the brains of some criminal douche-bag trying to break into the local Bank, huh?" he asked hatefully, his finger trembling on the kill-switch.

Lance flinched slightly at the sight of a gun muzzle looking directly onto him, clearly not having expected this kind of move on the part of Joey. Luckily, his friend that had restrained him just a moment ago now intervened on his behalf by putting the barrel of his machine gun right before Joey's face.

"If you two don't calm down right now, you're both gonna get a bullet in your heads," he threatened the two quarreling robbers, his former jesting tone quickly changing to a serious, bossy one.

Joey and Lance exchanged some conflicting glances until Joey finally decided to listen to the voice of reason and slowly lowered his pistol. Once he did, the one with a machine gun followed his example as well and said,

"One thing Joey's right about is that this operation isn't over yet. And until it is, you morons better not do anything that could jeopardize its outcome. After we're done here, you two may tear each other apart for what I care – I won't give a shit. But if you fuck anything up before that moment, don't come to me begging to save you from what the Boss is going to do to you for this."

At the mention of this 'Boss', the two quarreling criminals both shifted uneasily as if having recalled some very unpleasant experience in dealing with him. Then Joey relaxed his posture a bit and took a few short steps away from his opponent.

"I guess we'll return to this matter a bit later," he said in a calmer tone, though still looking daggers at Lance.

"We sure will," the other robber replied menacingly.

The two thugs then dispersed separate ways from each other, leaving their mediator stand in triumph from having so smoothly sorted out the conflict between them. It was vital that this operation they were carrying out here remained unsighted, and all things that could compromise its secrecy like this absurd feud had to be eliminated no later than they occurred. Thankfully, so far no one other than the Bank's captive guards and their own gang knew a thing about what was going on here, and if they could keep it this way until the end of their mission, the police would hardly ever pick their trail afterwards.

However, the mobsters had no idea that there was one more person unknown to them who was aware of their illegal actions. That person was sitting crouched on the rooftop of a neighboring building overlooking the Bank and was watching them through one of the Bank's windows with his night binoculars. He was about six feet tall and had lean, slender, well-built masculine body type like that of a professional male athlete. His hair had raven-black color and was shaggy and unkempt, hanging over his forehead and reaching the back of his neck. His body was all covered in armored unitard made of resistant kevlar material that was almost as black as his hair. He was also wearing blue shoulder pads and a large chest plate emblazoned with a symbol of a blue bird with its wings spread to his shoulders. In addition to this unusual outfit, around the mysterious man's waist was hanging a dark utility belt with various ingenious gadgets and devices attached to it, which purpose was probably known only to the man himself. The enigmatic stranger had a guise of a young man who was maybe just in his early twenties, but there was no telling for sure about it as the only feature of his appearance that could tell his age for sure – his face – was securely concealed by an onyx-black stylized domino mask covering a large facial area around the man's eyes, temples and cheek-bones. The man obviously had an eye toward the idea of concealing his identity, which, together with the rest of his traits, could only be a sign of one thing – he was a vigilante.

Which vigilante exactly he was, though, was a far more challenging question. He was undoubtedly no Batman, but he didn't look like any of his younger sidekicks as well. Either Gotham's protector had picked a new member for his team or there was a completely new masked hero to have entered the picture. For now, though, it wasn't even clear yet if there was any connection between him and the Dark Knight, and if he was even a hero in the first place. But regardless of his affiliations, he appeared to have some interest in what was happening at Blüdhaven Bank right now.

At some point, the mysterious masked man moved the binoculars away from his face, exposing his sapphire-like blue eyes showing from the eyelets in his mask. Those eyes continued to regard the Bank's external layout for some time as the vigilante pondered into thoughts.

" _ **For weeks I have been chasing the trail of several murders that were committed in Gotham. That trail has led me here, to Blüdhaven – a city where going to hell after death is considered a promotion. At first I believed those murders to be connected to Gotham's crime lord, Roman Sionis, also known as the Black Mask. But now that my searches have brought me here, I am no longer so sure about it. Sionis might be an influential crime boss with lots of powerful connections, but to rob a city bank outside Gotham like this is too audacious even by his standards. I have to find out who this gang is really working for.**_ "

Amid this thought, the vigilante placed his binoculars back into his utility belt and took out some handgun-like gadget loaded with a triple-clawed mechanical hook protruding from its muzzle. That gadget was called a Grapnel Gun and was devised to grapple onto various vantage points and ledges. Once holding it tight in his hand, the vigilante stood up and jumped off the roof he was sitting on all the way down.

After falling about half the distance to the ground, the enigmatic man fired his grapnel gun in mid-air right at the Bank's building in front of him. The device launched a cable line which tridental end dug into the fundament of the Bank's canopy-like superstructure above its entry door almost at a speed of a bullet. Then the cable line retracted, dartingly pulling the vigilante right to the spot where it had adhered to the building.

At the last second before the grapnel wire found its end, the masked man pulled the gun's trigger again, causing the device to detach from the fundament it clung to. This left the vigilante in a free fall, but he expertly converted his fall into a double front somersault and softly landed on his feet with graciousness of a cat. The mysterious man was displaying agility and athleticism of a professional acrobat, and the way how effortlessly he was performing all the moves spoke of his solid proficiency and experience in this. If he really was as young as he appeared to be, he must have been trained to do this kind of stuff since early childhood.

As the vigilante stood in front of the entrance to Blüdhaven Bank, he briefly observed the face of the building and then clicked something on the temple part of his mask. When he did, the eyelets in his mask became folded with flaring lens, making his eyes look blank white from outside. But that was only the outer effect. Through the lens-covered eyelets, the enigmatic man started seeing everything around him in panoramic, digital, ultraviolet view. The entire environment before his eyes became purplish and half-translucent with all its physical objects getting distinctly outlined against the background and their contours turning highlighted. This felt very similar to an X-Ray effect, only with lesser degree of detail and transparency of the viewed objects. However, this unique vision mode had more to its application than just providing the ability to see through solid objects. The gadget was also equipped with a proximity radar which could detect thermal wakes left by living beings and make them visible by the infrared color of radiation their bodies were emanating. Thanks to this feature, the vigilante could also discern a multitude of orange-colored human shaped figures flaring on the ultraviolet background behind the Bank's walls before him.

" _ **Eight bodies moving. Evidently, those of the very thugs robbing this Bank now. The rest appear to be the security they have subdued. If these robbers were able to neutralize all the guards at the Bank without even making a sound, they must be pretty skillful at what they do. Probably armed to the teeth as well. Still, nothing insurmountable for me. I just need to find a way to enter the building stealthily."**_

With this goal in mind, the vigilante approached the Bank's main entry door and studied it in a closer look. After a few seconds of visual examination, the masked man carefully palpated its surface with his right palm.

" _ **The main door has no signs of break-in. Just as I suspected, those robbers knew better than to infiltrate the Bank through its most guarded and protected entrance. There has to be some other means into this building that they used."**_

Faced with this comprehension, the vigilante turned off the Night Vision mode in his mask and then briskly broke into running. The mysterious man was looking to pass the Bank's building around and see if it had more entrances. He knew that he had to hurry because with every second passed, the criminals kept getting closer to completing their mission and escaping from this place.

Despite wearing armor and carrying a whole bunch of gadgets and devices, the vigilante also turned out to be very fast and covered the distance along the building's perimeter with speed and dexterity of a sprinter. After turning round the second corner, he came across another entry door. This one was made of metal and had a coded lock on it. The masked man had to turn his Night Vision back on to study the door in detail.

" _ **This gate seems to be a back-door entrance, but it doesn't have any pry marks on it either. The criminals must have been even more unorthodox in their choice of method of penetrating into the Bank."**_

Switching his vision mode back to normal, the vigilante took a few steps away from the back-door and swept his eyes over the building again. After calculating the alternative options the robbers could have gone for, he once more reached for his Grapnel Gun and blasted it at the ledge of the Bank's roof. In the following instant, he was already on top of the building, making an elegant tumbleset over the roof's verge and at once expertly jumping to standing right on its surface.

As the vigilante felt firm on his feet, he glanced ahead of him and instantly spotted what he had been looking to find there. It was a grey cabin-like build-up erected in the very center of the plain roof surface, with a door leading into it. The masked man was certain the Bank also had to have a roof entrance like most other buildings did, and as soon as he got reassured in this, he resolutely headed for the door, not even caring to examine it with his Night Vision first.

However, just as the vigilante tried to open the door, to his surprise he found it to be locked from the other side. This brought the enigmatic man back to the necessity of activating his Night Vision and scanning the entrance for traces of damage.

" _ **This is starting to get odd already. The only possible entrance to the Bank other than those two I have just seen should be right before my eyes, but it's also not broken up. How could those thugs get into the building without snapping off any of the locks? Maybe they used some other entrance I'm not aware of yet? But what kind of one can this possibly be? Could they tunnel their way into the Bank? No, this is ridiculous - they'd never pulled off something like this without getting themselves revealed to the security and to the local police. Something here doesn't add up."**_

Puzzled by his discoveries, the mysterious man took a moment to ponder everything he'd just learned. Quickly, though, he came to the only reasonable conclusion his observations suggested.

" _ **Well, whatever's the method of infiltrating the Bank that those robbers used, it is not accessible to me. This means that I have to devise one of my own to do the same. If my intuition has made me climb on this roof, maybe this really is the course of action I should continue developing further."**_

Snatching at this inference, the vigilante paced a few feet back from the door and then gamboled high into the air. While in mid-air, he pirouetted several times with his whole body like some figure skater and then sharply brought forth his leg right at the door handle. In the following second, there was a loud clapping sound and the door was burst open, the metal bolt bar that used to lock it from the other side getting fractured in half. The vigilante didn't exactly approve of damaging public property even when it was dictated by the grounds of extreme necessity, but right now he was forced to be following other priorities.

The man in a mask stepped into the revealed passageway which brought him to a set of stairs leading downwards. Without thinking long he descended them, looking to find his way into the Bank's main hall from here.

After crossing several stairwells, the vigilante encountered the first door that could potentially lead to some of the building's inner premises. Unfortunately, he quickly picked that it was similar in design to the door he had come across on the ground floor, having the same braced metal frame and, what was even more frustrating, an electronic coded lock.

"Damn it!" the masked man cursed aloud out of spite, barely refraining from slamming his gauntleted fist into the door.

" _ **I should have guessed from the start that at a bank of this caliber, a roof exit can't just be directly connected with the indoor spaces without having the same access control systems blocking the way between them. I may have been trained by a man that many people call 'the world's greatest detective', but I'm clearly lacking his ability of foresight, at least yet. Still, it doesn't necessarily mean that I can't come up with a solution on the second try."**_

Intent upon quickly finding a solution to his problem, the vigilante surveyed the surroundings, searching for anything that could help him progress past this hindrance. After seeing nothing around but grey faceless fundament, he took note of the sole object that could be of help to him. It was a square-shaped vent shaft running along the right wall's length about ten feet above, with a grated covering adorning its front side. The sight of this finding made the vigilante get caught up in more musings.

" _ **I used to do a lot of vent-climbing back when I was still a kid, but now that I have grown to be at least a couple feet taller and about fifty pounds heavier, I don't feel so eager to do this anymore. Still, it appears that I'm lacking any other options at the moment. After all, my former mentor that taught me this wasn't above doing the same even with his much more imposing stature and much older age."**_

Having made up his mind, the man in a mask once again reached for his Grapnel Gun and fired it at the grate in the shaft. The wired hook anchored to the grate's bar with its triple-bladed claw, but before the cable line could start pulling the vigilante to where the hook had adhered, he clicked the gun's trigger twice, making the wire steady itself. Then the masked man grabbed the cable with his other hand and started tugging it toward himself hard. The grate was tightly fastened to the vent shaft and the effort it was taking the vigilante to pull it off was quite excruciating. But soon the construction gave way and got torn off its bolts, dropping down on the stairs with a loud metal clang.

Upon seeing this, the vigilante detached his Grapnel Gun from the torn-off grate and then took a high jump at the vent shaft. Once his hands grabbed the edge of its exposed aperture, he quickly pulled himself up. The vent's metal frame chirred perilously from his weight, but the vigorous masked man disregarded that and just stroke a half-crouched pose, uncomfortably squeezing himself into the shaft. Despite him no longer being as lean and short as he was about five years ago, he was still at the peak of his agility and flexibility, which turned out to be good enough for him to fit into this narrow hole.

The next few minutes were all about patience and persistence to the vigilante. Crawling through this cramped shaft didn't feel very comfortable, to say the least, and it also didn't help that he had little but no idea about the exact location this shaft was leading him to. Soon, however, he began to get reassured that at least his direction was right as he started hearing the distant echoes of the voices of the criminals he was tracing now. At first, only some barely audible aftersounds could be distinguished, but the farther he kept crawling, the louder the voices became, to the point when he could overhear entire conversations between the robbers.

"How much longer are they going to dink with that vault there?" one of the thugs could be heard grumbling. "It's almost midnight and we're still done here!"

"What's the big hurry? Late for a gay club?" the other thug teased him.

"Not fucking funny," the first one snarled back angrily. "I just wanted to get home before 1 AM to watch the next episode of _Daredevil_."

"You watch TV series where guys like you get their asses kicked by a vigilante freak?!" the other one smirked. "You gotta be completely retarded."

There was a short moment of silence to follow that comment as if the first interlocutor really got put to shame by it. But then he finally managed to get through with his abashment and returned,

"Still more interesting than your stupid _Vampire Diaries._ "

After that phrase it was probably the other guy's turn to feel ashamed. Meanwhile, the vigilante who was hearing all that loud and clear realized he already got close to the crime scene and decided to turn on his Night Vision again to get his bearings.

As the world before the masked man's eyes turned purplish and digital again, he saw that the thermal reflections of the two criminals whose small talk he'd just overheard were right underneath him. One more orange-colored figure was also radiating from a distance of about ten yards away, and one seemed to be moving somewhere below it, as if walking stairs or something. The rest of the gang was looming deep downstairs along with the majority of the Bank's guards they have taken hostage, probably in the lobby on the ground floor near the vault they were trying to break into.

" _ **The way the robbers are spread across the building is working in my favor. But before I can start making use of it, I have to find a way to exit the shaft without getting noticed."**_

The man in a mask continued to creep through the vent on all fours, his every move even more careful and polished than before to make sure the two thugs beneath couldn't hear him moving inside the shaft. After crossing about twenty more feet of the shaft's length, he finally found another grated covering admitting to the premises of the main hall. All that remained was to remove the grate from his way, and he would be inside the main hall. But the simplicity of this task was only alleged as then he caught himself figuring out that it also implied some very undesirable side-effects.

" _ **If I just tear this heavy set of grill off its spot, I can inadvertently make a lot of noise that will at once give my presence away to the robbers. I have to be extremely careful when doing this - otherwise, I might be taken out of the game before I even get into it."**_

Upon making certain that both criminals beneath were at a respectful distance from him, the masked man grabbed the grate's bars with his hands and started smoothly, but forcefully pressing the grill outward. His physical strength could well allow him to crumple it like a tin can, but this time it was not just about getting rid of an obstacle – it was also about doing it quietly and covertly. Therefore, what would normally take him only a couple of seconds to do was now taking him a little bit more time. Still, the metal couldn't resist the intense force applied to it forever, and at some point, the bolts holding the grill fastened to the vent began to drop off one by one, until only the vigilante's hands were left preventing it from falling off completely as well.

Without quitting hold of the loose grate, the man in a mask carefully crept to the edge of the newly opened exit from the shaft and jumped off it on the ground beneath. His legs quietly landed on a soft red carpet that covered the floor of some balcony-like platform enveloping this entire hall along the perimeter. Beneath could be seen the bank lobby with the same red carpet flooring, a long 'U'-shaped reception desk and numerous ACD's spread all across the hall's periphery. The lobby was connected with the balcony area by a long set of broad stairs in the northern part of the hall, just as he had deduced earlier when watching one of the thugs walking there. It turned out that the main hall of the Bank really was divided into two floors, but the upper one actually lacked seamless ground and was represented only by a wall-adjacent platform overlooking the lobby. This provided perfect view of the entire environment and thus offered the vigilante a much greater variety of tactical ruses to calculate in advance.

The man in a mask sharply turned his head to the left, watching out for the two thugs he'd been trying to avoid all along. Luckily, they still had their backs turned to him, completely unsuspicious of his emergence from the air vent. The other two on the stairs and on the opposite side of the balcony also had their gazes directed somewhere else. Hurrying to avail himself of this, the vigilante swiftly sneaked his way to the right of the balcony and slid behind the nearest corner. Once there, he carefully put the torn-off grill against the wall and then took out his binoculars again, looking to study the local scenery in greater detail.

" _ **Although slipping past the warding mobsters is a success already, if I'm looking to take out their entire gang, I will also need to find myself a convenient position from where I can start ambushing them one by one until there's no one left to oppose me."**_

After having examined the hall area through the field glasses, the masked man found only one detail of the local environment that could provide him some positional advantage. It was one of the arc-shaped foundations high above that supported the hall's ceiling. The wooden beams interconnecting those structures could be used as perfect vantage points from where he would be able to attack the robbers from a distance and at the same time remain far beyond their field of vision. The only thing that was off about this seemingly flawless scheme was reaching that location.

" _ **Whereas my Grapnel Gun can certainly help me with attaining a spot suspended at such a great height, if I use it now, the loud sound it makes when fired will inevitably attract the attention of the criminals. Since there is no way to mute this noise effect, the only way for me to avoid getting spotted at the early going is to create some sort of diversion for the robbers to make sure they will be too busy with something else to detect the source of the sound when I shoot the device. The only question is: what can possibly get those thugs so interested?"**_

The answer to this came quite unexpectedly when the vigilante's train of thought got interrupted by one of the thugs to the left asking wonderingly,

"Hey, what the hell with all those bolts on the floor?"

Upon hearing that phrase, the man in a mask experienced a thick, sticky feeling of being busted.

" _ **Again I find myself having made another fluff by leaving some traces of my presence for the robbers to find. Even though I've put the torn-off grill out of sight, I didn't even think the criminals would be so attentive to detail as to notice the dropped bolts on the floor. It seems I have underestimated my enemy, and now this can play a very low-down trick with me."**_

In the meantime, the criminal that had discovered the bolts on the floor continued making further findings.

"And where the fuck is the vent covering?" he voiced another question aloud, making one more step toward spying out the lurking vigilante.

Finally, his exclamations caught the attention of his partner that had criticized his leisure time preferences earlier before.

"The hell are you barking about here?" the thug asked him with annoyance in his voice.

"I don't know, man," he replied perplexedly. "The vent covering – it's just fucking gone."

The other thug knitted his eyebrows together in a grimace of distrusting confusion and then looked at the aperture in the vent shaft.

"Are you even sure it was here in the first place?" he asked his suspicious fellow, clearly not impressed by his discovery yet.

"No no no, I'm telling you dude, it _was_ here!" he started anxiously coaxing him. "And I can swear there were none of these bolts lying here on the floor just a couple minutes ago."

His interlocutor then lowered his gaze to the four metal fasteners sprawled at his feet.

"So what's your point?" he asked him then, still not sounding fully convinced.

"My point is that someone must have got here through this vent while we were looking another way," the first thug replied in such a tone as if he didn't completely believe his very own inference.

The other thug only scoffed arrogantly at his words.

"Pfff, someone has got here through the vent?! You really need to stop watching so many superhero TV series."

The first one scowled angrily at this remark with his whole masked face, but still didn't give up on his apprehension.

"You can laugh as much as you want, but I'm sure something's not right here!" he insisted. "I'll go check the rest of the balcony and see if there's something else here that's also suspicious."

The other robber just waved his hand in a gesture of utter nonchalance and turned his back to his partner to start walking the other way.

"If you're so fond of making an idiot out of yourself, then be my guest," he returned and then left his gang-mate stand all alone with his crazy suspicions.

The first thug seethed him for this impudent display of acrimony, but then re-focused on the matter at hand and headed for the opposite side of the platform, the machine gun in his hands held at the ready. The robber was adamant that the mysterious disappearance of the vent covering was no accident and that the cause of this nonsense had to be somewhere close around. So he continued to slowly and cautiously walk toward the verge of the balcony, unaware, though, that right around its corner, the vigilante could see him approach with his Night Vision.

" _ **It seems that I will have to break my cover a little earlier than I planned. But who said I can't at least do this silently?"**_

The man a mask then leaned onto the wall behind him and carefully crept along it toward the corner from where the thug was coming, his Night Vision mode still on. He patiently waited for the moment when the mobster would be within less an arm's length from him, and then, just as the robber's thermal figure barely showed from out of the corner, he sharply grabbed him in a chokehold and dragged him behind his covering place. The vigilante performed the move so fast that the criminal had no fraction of a second to even process what had happened to him and could only gasp fearfully as somebody's strong, well-muscled arm braced him around his neck and tightly covered his mouth with his palm, preventing him from calling for help. The thug helplessly dropped his weapon on the floor and started vehemently struggling in an attempt to get out of the lock, but the mysterious assailant was holding him with a grip of steel.

"Shhh, we don't wanna scare your friends, do we?" the vigilante whispered playfully to the wallowing criminal.

The thug tried to mumble something through the masked man's hand, still fighting out of the chokehold with all his might, but soon the lack of oxygen began to show and the mobster's strength started fading. A few seconds later, the thug's frightened eyes rolled into the back of his head in a loss of consciousness and his body went limp. When it happened, the vigilante released his hold on him and carefully dragged his senseless husk into the depth of the corner.

" _ **One down, seven more to go. Of course, sooner or later, the rest of the thugs will notice that one of them has been taken out. I need to make sure that by the time it happens, I will have already occupied that vantage point under the ceiling."**_

Unfortunately, the discovery of the first robber having been neutralized was about to happen rather sooner than later as his gang-mate that had been so distrustful toward his apprehensions suddenly decided to ask him from the other end of the balcony,

"Found anything yet? Any vent-crawling monsters, zombies, or maybe vampires?"

The thug's intonation was clearly a mocking one as he must have decided to continue further messing with his partner. However, when no response followed to his snide remark, he slowly began to grow concerned.

"What's this, a silent treatment?" he asked, still trying to sound imperturbable. "Did my calling you an idiot offend you so much?"

Again, his questions were left unanswered. Even though the robber kept convincing himself that those were probably some mind games his partner was now trying to play with him in retort for his acidic comments, gradually, it was getting ever harder to continue taking this lightly.

"Alright, alright, I get it – you're trying to mess with my head and make me believe there's really something going on with you there," he shouted as if playing the buffoon, although already growing antsy on the inside. "Very well, I'll pretend to be playing into your hand and go check on you. After all, who knows, maybe you really found some alien monster there that had come through the vent and is now chewing on your brains as we speak?"

With little hesitation, the masked mobster started making his way to the distant end of the balcony. Meanwhile, on the other end of the platform, the lurking vigilante cursed inwardly again, angered at the non-dwindling wave of complications that kept on preventing him from planning out his strategy. However, a moment later he got illumed by a fresh idea of how he could turn this chain of ill-luck to his advantage.

" _ **I could pick off this thug stealthily just like I picked off the previous one, but instead I think I'll purposely do this overtly so that the henchmen on the opposite side of the balcony get alerted by this and come here. If my trick works and they get too distracted by the sight of what happened to their fellow goons, this will give me an opening for grappling onto one of those arcs above."**_

With this plan registered in his mind, the man in a mask reached for his right calf where a black holster was hanging wrapped around it. Inside this holster was placed a pair of his most favorite and, arguably, most dangerous weapons – eskrima sticks, also known as kali sticks - a name originating from the traditional martial arts of the Philippines. Wielded as both offensive and defensive weapons, these sticks were originally supposed to be used only for conducting melee combat. However, the eskrima sticks the vigilante carried were not like the ones known to the majority of the world. Just like almost all other weapons he had, they were also considerably advanced and upgraded and had multifunctional application. His sticks were made out of unbreakable polymer and were wired with blue-colored tasers on their tips, which, when clashed together, could create a pulse of electricity that would stun and knock off enemies. In addition to this, the sticks were modified to have the ability to be thrown like long-ranged weapons and ricochet off walls and objects to return right to vigilante's hands. That was how the man in a mask was intending to use them now as he took one eskrima stick from his holster and held it tight in his right hand, anticipating the moment when the second thug would show out of the corner.

In the interim, the robber approaching him kept growing evermore tensed with every next pace he was making toward where his friend was supposed to be looking for other traces of the mysteriously disappeared vent covering. If that was some joke his partner in crime was playing with him, it had clearly stretched on late. The criminal's heart was only warmed by the thought of how bad would be the ass-kicking he would deliver to his gang-mate for messing with him like that.

When the last foot remained separating the thug from what the balcony's corner was obscuring from his sight, he took a deep breath and then resolutely stepped past it, trying to make it look like whatever his partner was involved with there hadn't stirred him one single bit.

"So, what do we have h-?" but before the robber was even was able to finish his question, the spectacle to have unfolded to his view seemed to have rendered him speechless.

The criminal froze on his spot in mid-sentence, his eyes that showed from the eyelets in his mask bugging out in utter shock. Before him lay the unconscious body of his partner whose suspicions about something going wrong here he had so rudely brushed aside, believing them to be just a display of paranoia and stupidity. And standing over his body was a tall, dark, menacing figure in a mask with some baton-like thing held in its hand.

"Surprise!" the vigilante greeted him with a smugly grin on his face and, before the robber could even lift a finger, the former sharply threw his eskrima stick at the floor area to the right of him.

The thug flinched frightenedly as the weapon dartingly rebounded off the floor, becoming redirected toward the balcony's balustrade behind his back, and then rebounded off the balustrade, hitting him straight to the back of his head. The vigilante was clearly a very skillful user of those sticks as he was even able to expertly calculate the deflection angle and hit his aim with marksman's precision.

The criminal who was completely unprepared for this kind of assault immediately lost his balance and fell on the ground face-first, dropping his machine gun in the process.

"Ungh!" he moaned mournfully, clutching at his head with both hands and rolling onto his back in anguish.

Of course, that groan of pain couldn't have been failed to be heard by the other two thugs warding the upper part of the hall.

"Huh?" one of them wondered aloud, unable to comprehend where the sound had come from.

"Who's screaming?" another one asked.

The two mobsters quickly lost their relaxed demeanor and alarmingly rushed to the opposite side of the balcony. This was the very effect the vigilante was counting on when pulling this thing off, and as soon as he detected their movement with his Night Vision, he knew what he had to do next.

The man in a mask returned his attention to the robber he'd just stunned with his eskrima stick. The knocked-off thug had already started to come to himself from the attack and was now trying to reach for his dropped machine gun. Not taking any chances with him, the vigilante jumped high into the air, making a screw somersault and then landing with his knees right on the belly of the spread-eagled criminal. The thug gasped gruesomely as the vigorous man nailed him to the ground with all his weight.

"Sorry, pal, play time's over for you," the vigilante quipped and then delivered a mighty fist-punch right to the gangster's masked face, knocking him out cold.

As the thug went down into no man's land, the man in a mask hastily got off him, picked up his dropped kali stick from the floor and ran up to the balcony's balustrade. Once coming close to it, he glimpsed to the left from where the two other henchmen were coming. Luckily, they still were too far away to see him, so he didn't waste time and grabbed the balustrade by its railing, climbing over it and thus allowing his body to hang loose from the other side of the balcony. This way he could remain concealed from view when the other two thugs would get here.

The vigilante continued hanging like this until the criminals arrived at the scene. Needless to say, the sight of their two gang-mates lying out for the count left quite an impression on them.

"Oh God, everyone, get your asses over here, NOW!" one of them cried in shock. "We've got two men down here!"

The thugs on the ground floor exchanged confused glances with one another in response to that call.

"The hell is going on over there?" the one with the name Lance asked, puzzled.

"I don't know. Go check," the one who had settled out his conflict with Joey earlier before replied, also sounding confused.

"Why me?" Lance argued.

"Why not?" his partner talked back to him as if not feeling very eager to do that himself.

Lance groaned discontentedly, but decided not to debate the issue further and just headed for the stairs leading up to the balcony area. Once he did, the thug to have ordered him to do this turned his attention to the one tampering with the vault.

"How much longer until you're done melting that fucking door?" he asked anxiously.

"Almost there," the one with the laser returned confidently.

"I heard the same about 15 minutes ago," he rebuked, "Hurry up, damn it!"

As the thugs on the ground floor went on nervously fussing around the vault, their two partners above went on fussing over their knocked-out comrades.

"Are they even alive?" one of the robbers asked fearfully.

"Yes, but they are unconscious," the other one replied while sitting hunched over the two motionless bodies.

Then he started trying to bring one of them to senses by slightly slapping him in the face.

"Hey man, come on, wake up!" he coaxed. "Can you hear me? Wake up!"

When all his attempts resulted in nothing, he snapped.

"Damn it, they're out cold!"

The other criminal gulped hard at this conclusion.

"Who could have done this to them?" he questioned, his body already shivering from fright.

"I'm more interested in where this someone is now," his partner said.

The vigilante who was still hanging from the balcony just a few feet away from those two only smiled at those words and then, upon making sure he was still out of the criminals' sight, started scaling his way past them along the balcony's ledge. Using his acrobatic agility, he began to grasp at the balcony's balusters one after another, looking almost like Tarzan climbing lianas in a jungle. In less than a few moments, the corner where the thugs had crowded in together was already left far behind him, and the vigilante eagerly hoisted up back on the balcony's surface and proceeded distancing himself from the criminals by running on his legs.

Upon coming to the center of the platform, the vigilante saw another thug racing up the stairs right toward him. This was an unexpected obstacle to stumble upon, which imposed on him the necessity to come up with a split-second decision on how it could be overcome.

 **"** _ **My first impulse was to knock that guy down by throwing at him one of my eskrima sticks, but then my rush-driven mind told me that spending even a few seconds on calculating the directions and reflections of the thrown weapon was a luxury I could not afford at such a heated moment. I need something plainer, simpler and faster right now."**_

The realization made the man in mask act on instinct as his left hand reflexively reached for his utility belt. From there he took out another unordinary device which had a boomerang-like shape and appeared to duplicate the bird symbol adorning his breast plate. He called this contraption a Wing-Ding and used it as a non-lethal ranged weapon to stun enemies or knock firearms from their hands. This was an adapted version of a similar weapon he'd been trained to wield in his boyhood days and had been continuously wielding ever since, only re-designed to fit his new identity and matured personality. The vigilante didn't enjoy utilizing it as much as his eskrima sticks, but at the same time, after so many years of continuous use, he mastered it like no other armament in his arsenal. Besides, unlike the kali sticks which could only hit their targets from a distance as a result of recoiling force, the Wing-Ding could be thrown directly into enemies and even return like a real boomerang. This was the very combination that could help him quickly get out of the predicament he'd found himself in.

As the robber running up the stairs got level with the enigmatic masked man on his way, he just couldn't help skidding to a gruff stop at the sight of such a wondrous character to appear before him. The stupefaction the vigilante's appearance had given him lasted only a couple of seconds, but even this was enough to provide the latter with an opening for his cunning maneuver. So before the criminal was even able to recollect his wits and pull the trigger of his machinegun, the man in mask crustily brought forth his right arm, sending the Wing-Ding straight into his opponent's mask-covered face. There was a loud, unpleasant popping sound of a nose getting broken and the thug fell on his back with a thunderous "Aaaaargh!"

The boomerang-like weapon flew right back to its owner as the vigilante dexterously caught it on the fly with one hand and placed it back into his belt. Now that the gangster in front of him was knocked down, it could be a perfect moment for taking him out for good and thus reducing the gang's numbers by one more member. Unfortunately, the man in a mask couldn't spend any more time on this as the two mobsters behind him must have already been alerted by their partner's agonized cry and could now spot him here any second. Therefore, he hurriedly took out his Grapnel Gun again and fired it at one of the wooden beams in-between the arcs above.

Before the two thugs in the rear even managed to peer out of the corner to observe the author of the latest wail of anguish, the vigilante was already sliding on the cable line all the way up to the ceiling. Once the wire brought him there, the agile man grabbed hold of the beam he'd hooked onto and pulled up on it like a gymnast circling the crossbar. He then sat half-crouched on the beam and started watching the panicking robbers beneath like a hawk watching its prey.

"There's someone else screaming from over there!" one of the two thugs on the balcony shouted, instantly rushing to the opposite part of the platform.

"Man, this just keep getting worse!" the other one added with a frightened tone to his voice, following his partner's lead.

When the mobsters finally got there, they found their gang-mate named Lance rolling over the floor and plucking at his masked face from the pain. One of them tried to help his fellow criminal up, but Joey just pushed him off, still livid about the injury he'd got.

"Get your fucking hands off me!" he yelled, his voice having grown nasal. "That bastard broke my fucking nose!"

"What bastard?" one of the thugs asked.

"Some asshole freak dressed in black and wearing a mask," Lance returned spitefully and drudgingly returned to his feet.

His partners before him gave each other blank glares.

"Batman?" the other one inquired wonderingly.

"No, that son of a bitch had no cape and pointed ears," Lance explained and then rolled up the lower part of his mask to wipe the blood from his face, "But he looked like someone who could share the same freakish league with him."

Although the two thugs were certainly relieved that the enigmatic assailant was not the infamous Dark Knight, the whole mystery around his persona still made them both tense with uneasiness.

"But where is that guy now?" the first robber questioned him then.

"How the fuck do I know?" Lance spat rankly and lowered his mask back. "He just fucking disappeared – vanished into thin air!"

This piece of information was successful in destroying the very last remnants of confidence that the two criminals had been trying to cling onto, finally making them surrender to despair.

"Oh God, how are we gonna find him then?" one of the thugs grieved.

"Man, I don't like this, not one little bit," the other one added ruefully.

"Shut the fuck up!" Lance barked at them and picked his discarded machine gun from the ground. "We need to keep looking or we're all dead!"

Once he took hold of the weapon, he lifted up his head and bawled out about the entire hall,

"Show yourself, chicken!"

The vigilante who was overlooking all this from above just grinned at this and muttered to himself,

"Oh I'll show ya', just wait."

With that, he clicked something on his right gauntlet, making some wrist-mounted gadget unfold from it with a distinctive mechanical gnash. The revealed mechanism was just as dark as the whole outfit the vigilante wore and had a hollow, pipe-like shape which resembled a gun. The man in a mask then straightened his right arm and grabbed it by the wrist with his left hand for better steadiness. Then he started slowly directing the device on his arm at the group of robbers standing on the balcony.

The three criminals gradually began to peel away in separate directions, each one holding his weapon at the ready and nervously twisting his head left and right in search of the lurking intruder. As one of them sheered away from the rest to the left, the vigilante focused his attention on him and followed his direction with a plain movement of his right arm. The vigilante's pulse was still very hurried after all the physical and mental strain he'd experienced, so it was real hard for him to steady his shaking arm. However, he managed to concentrate and balance out his hectic body, which allowed him to finally take a good aim at his target. Then he clicked something on his right gauntlet again and, within a blink of an eye, the thug he was drawing a bead on sharply clutched at his neck.

"Ouch! What the- ?" the robber barely managed to utter as he suddenly groped for some small, yet sharp thing sticking right out of his carotid artery.

Startled, the criminal drew the object out of his neck and found it to be a tiny black dart with a very thin, but long needle. As soon as his mind processed that thought, the thug's vision swam violently and he was overcome with a very intense feeling of vertigo. In a few seconds, his legs helplessly gave way under him and he dropped to the ground as if having been shot down. This didn't go unnoticed by one of his gang-mates to the right of him, who squalled in alarm,

"On man, not you too! What happened to you?"

The thug immediately raced to his partner's aid, as did Lance who was searching the place nearby. Together they found another member of their gang lying unconscious on the floor. While the first robber hurriedly leaned over his comrade's senseless body and started trying to bring him to life, Lance fixated on studying the area around the unresponsive criminal and at once noticed a small dark object with a needle lying discarded near his hand. He picked it up and scrutinized it closely as his partner lamented over the condition of their unconscious friend.

"This is bad, he won't wake up too!"

"That's because he got hit by a tranquilizer dart," Lance summed up after examining the tiny weapon in his hand and then angrily tossing it aside. "That bastard's got everything!"

"But where the hell is he shooting them from?" the other thug asked worriedly, now clearly sounding more concerned about his own well-being than his gang-mate's.

The answer to that question was received by him that very instant as another dart abruptly came almost from out of nowhere and pierced him right in the neck.

"Ack!" the robber squealed as Lance winced on his place in amazement and then sharply shifted his glance toward where the shot should have come from.

It didn't take the criminal too long to figure out the projectile's grazing trajectory and fix his sight on the area right under the hall's ceiling. There he saw his offender sitting on one of the arc-supporting beams and directing whatever weapon he was using to launch those darts right at him. Lance quickly responded by pointing the muzzle of his machine gun back at the vigilante.

"Think you can hide from me there?" he shouted. "Think again!"

On that phrase, the criminal opened fire at the man in a mask. The latter didn't expect to be descried so soon and couldn't help starting to fumble as the volleys of bullets flew into him. The vigilante tried to make use of his agility to avoid the barrages, but on such an unlikely position, the room for this kind of maneuvers was limited to him. Therefore, at some point, one of the bullets finally managed to graze him across the shoulder. Luckily for him, the breastplate he wore was bulletproof and didn't let the projectile pierce his flesh. Nonetheless, it couldn't save him from the hard impact as well, and the vigilante lost his balance and fell off the beam.

While falling, the masked man still managed to tuck himself up and convert his harsh swoop into another acrobatic flip. Concurrently, he took out his Grapnel Gun and fired it at the balustrade on the right side of the balcony girding the upper part of this hall. Lance continued to shoot more bullets into his foe even when the latter was still in mid-air, but once the masked man's gadget clung onto the balcony and propelled him over to it, all the discharged barrages were left far behind him.

Once the Grapnel Gun's line reached its hitch point, the vigilante jumped over the balcony's balustrade and rolled for several more feet by inertia. Lance went on shelling him with more volleys from the other side, at the same time calling to his friends on the ground floor to join forces with him.

"He's right over there on the balcony! Shoot him!"

This time the robbers on the ground floor demonstrated less indifference to that call for help as two of them hurried to the center of the hall to add some fire power to Lance's efforts. Those were the robber named Joey that was armed with a pistol and the one that had temporarily reconciled him with Lance, armed with a machine gun. The two of them took cover behind the reception desk and joined Lance in shooting more rounds at the right side of the balcony where their enemy now was. This forced the vigilante into performing a series of evasive maneuvers as he started rapidly doing various cartwheels, tumblesets and somersaults to avoid the numerous bullets expelled at him.

"You're not getting away this time!" Lance cried after him, relentlessly firing away the entire clip of his machine gun.

The vigilante just kept on inexorably dodging the fire, waiting for the moment when the thug would run out of ammo. Finally, when Lance had to cease firing to change the emptied clip, the man in a mask who was still holding the Grapnel Gun in his hand blasted it right at the robber on the opposite side of the balcony. Lance staggered, believing for a moment that the triple-bladed hook launched into him was about to impale his sorry bulk. But then, much to his relief and at the same time further astonishment, the clawed end of the vigilante's device grappled onto his machine gun instead. Before the robber could even process what had happened, his opponent on the other side of the balcony curtly jerked the stretched wire line of his gadget, causing the criminal to get pulled down by the weapon in his hands right over the balcony's balustrade. Lance could only scream in shock as his body got turned head over heels and then dropped all the way down to the ground floor. Thankfully, the distance between the ground floor and the balcony was not too long, so he couldn't fall to death from there. Still, it was enough to put him out of action for quite a while.

The two thugs firing at the man in mask from behind the reception desk couldn't help but be further discomposed by the loss of another of their gang-mates.

"Oh shit, Lance has been taken out!" Joey cried.

"Blow on it! Just keep shooting!" his partner told him without stopping to shower the balcony with more strings of bursts.

The vigilante just kept on distancing himself farther and farther from the harm's way, ensuring that the seemingly infinite volleys of gunfire could not reach him there. Eventually, when the robbers realized that this gun-battle was beginning to turn into nothing but a waste of ammo on their part, the one with a machine gun decided to introduce a new tactical scheme here.

"That son of a bitch is too nimble, we won't hit him like that," he said to Joey. "Try to draw up closer to him for a precise shot. I'll cover you."

Joey hesitatingly lingered on his place for a few seconds, worriedly glimpsing now at the balcony and now at his partner to have given him this order. The robber was obviously reluctant to shorten the distance with someone who could deal with him the way he'd just dealt with the rest of his gang-mates. But then he finally found the courage to jump out of his cover and sprint toward the stairs leading up to the balcony.

The vigilante saw this from above and immediately held his Wing-Ding at full cock. He waited for the criminal to run up to the very last stair, and then, once the latter was there, he sent his weapon straight into his right knee. Joey hardly had a chance to even understand what had happened to him when something forcefully slashed at his leg, causing it to go numb from severe pain. This resulted in him shortly losing his footing and tumbling down the stairs with wallop.

Joey's partner who was supposed to cover him during his outbreak also failed to react to the vigilante's feint promptly enough and opened fire only by the time his enemy had already retrieved his Wing-Ding and became ready to make his next move. So once a new round of bullets started drumming against the balcony's balustrade, the man in a mask was already taking a dive to the ground floor in another impressive somersault.

The vigilante as always gracefully landed right on his feet as the robber behind the reception desk continued trying to take an aim at him. When he opened fire again, the man in a mask went for more acrobatic skits to elude the discharged bullets. Concurrently, he also took out his eskrima sticks from the holster on his right calf. Only this time he wasn't going to start utilizing them right away. Instead, the vigilante clicked two tiny buttons on the hilts of both weapons. This activated the electrical tasers on their tips which started humming subtly as if getting charged with some energy. Then, while still dancing away from all the gunfire ceaselessly peppered at him, the masked man clashed his sticks together, causing them to flash in a blinding blaze of electric discharge. After the arc of electricity between the sticks dissipated, their wired tips started glowing blue with accrued electrical power. This was when the vigilante made his final evasive pirouette and then violently threw one of the sticks toward where the robber shooting at him was taking cover. Only he directed the weapon not at the robber himself, but at one of the many computers standing on that reception desk the robber was sheltering himself with. The charged kali stick plunged into a monitor, almost piercing all the way through its display with a loud crashing sound. The collision of the electrified weapon with the electronic insides of the equipment caused the latter to erupt in a fountain of sparks that washed all over the criminal positioned near it.

"Ahhhhh!" the mobster shrieked, sharply turning his face away from the candescent flakes.

Seeing that the robber got blindsided, the vigilante hastened to jump at the chance and blisteringly dashed toward the reception desk. Before the thug could even get a glimpse of what his adversary was about to do, the man in a mask already bounced off the desk high into the air, flipped over himself and slammed both his feet into the criminal's chest in a mighty dropkick. The gangster collapsed to the ground with a loud and hoarse gasp as the attack must have taken the whole air out of his lungs. The vigilante, however, didn't stop at this and also added a punch to the thug's masked face for good measure, thus turning his lights completely out.

Another law-breaker was successfully neutralized, but before the man in a mask could even take a second to relish in this perception, more challenges came to haunt him. All out of the blue, one of the computers to the left of him bizarrely burst to pieces in an abrupt, deafening sound of a gunshot. The vigilante almost jolted out of his boots as his body got hailed by a shower of white-hot fragments of the former high-tech equipment and multiple fractured wooden splinters. He quickly adopted a crouching pose and rolled close to the reception desk, taking a cover behind it. Then, an instant thereafter, another shot thundered, blowing up a part of the reception desk just a couple of feet away from him. As the dust created by the shot settled a bit, the vigilante briefly peeped out of his hiding place to observe the source of the havoc going on. What he saw then was another criminal coming from the side of the bank vault with an imposing shotgun held clasped in his hands. The man in a mask realized then that in full swing of the battle he had lost count of the thugs he'd taken out and forgot that there was one more left he hadn't dealt with yet.

" _ **The clearing of this place must have got me so carried away that I even lost sight of the guy responsible for breaking into the door to the vault. Another bad blunder of mine which may well turn out to be incorrigible as well."**_

The vigilante's subliminal analysis of his tactical errors was cut off by some words of rage addressed to him by the thug coming from afore,

"You skull-fucked freak! You think you can just burst in here and ruin our entire operation?!"

After that phrase, the man in a mask heard the distinctive mechanical click of the shotgun's slide getting racked in anticipation of another discharge. Knowing all too well what was going to follow the next instant, the vigilante grabbed his second eskrima stick and brusquely jumped out of his hiding place.

"That's not all I'm planning to ruin tonight!" he shouted back at the mobster, concurrently tossing his weapon at the floor area about a few feet away from where his enemy was standing.

Before the robber could even put his finger on the trigger of his weapon, the ingenious device hurled at him ricocheted off the ground straight into his crotch. The criminal's eyes almost popped out of his head from the unspeakable pain he found himself in a moment thereafter as he dropped to his knees, gripping hold of his lower part with an anguished cry.

"Urrrrk, you son of a bitch…" the gangster swore, almost coughing up every word out of himself.

"I bet a ruined operation is no longer your top-priority concern, right?" the vigilante sneered while scrambling over the reception desk and then starting to approach his foe in a very slow and casual, almost relaxed manner.

"Fuck you…" the thug growled in return and tried to reach for his discarded shotgun.

The man in a mask had that well scouted, though, and immediately sprang into the air, corkscrewing like a human fidget and then slugging the bowed down criminal across the face with a scathing roundhouse kick. The mobster dropped to the side like an overturned vase, at once joining the ranks of other gang-mates lying senseless over this place.

Once the last thug was neutralized, the vigilante relaxed his posture a bit and started breathing heavily to bear the stress he'd just experienced. There it was done at last – all eight gangsters taken out, all hostages saved and the occupied Bank secured. It had been awhile since he stopped crime operations like this all by himself, and even despite his generally self-confident, presumptions character, he had to admit he couldn't have helped feeling some uncertainty bugging him out during this entire mission. But now that it was complete, that feeling was gradually getting replaced with a much more pleasurable and appropriate feeling of pride. Of course, he still had to interrogate one of the thugs and try to make him tell who their gang was working for, but compared to everything to have preceded this moment, this was a part he had much less reservations about. With that understanding assumed, the man in mask picked his dropped kali stick from the floor, easily tossed it up into the air and then dexterously caught it right into the holster on his leg.

The proud vigilante was about to start pacing back to the reception desk to extract his other stick from the monitor it stuck into, but before he even made one step, out of the corner of the eye he caught sight of somebody moving near the stairs leading to the balcony. He quickly recognized this somebody as the thug he had hit into the knee with his Wing-Ding earlier before, his hobbling walk telling the story. The criminal whose name was Joey was obviously trying to escape from here without the vigilante noticing him, but was unable to do this fast enough because of his bad leg.

" _ **Once again, my triumph is delayed indefinitely as there turns out to be one thug still left unbeaten. Well, since the rest of the goons are out cold and I still need someone to divulge to me the information on the leader of their criminal group, I know how I can still benefit from this mishap."**_

With that frame of mind, the man in a mask forgot about his stuck eskrima stick for short while and bolted to the fleeing criminal instead. Making good use of his heightened speed and agility, he effortlessly covered the relatively long distance between himself and the hobbling gangster within almost only a few seconds. By the time Joey was able to detect some rapid advance coming right at him, a tall, dreadful figure dressed in black was already standing just a couple of feet away from him, nearly screening him with the large shade it cast.

"Leaving so soon?" the masked man asked humorously, his joking tone seeming very contrast to his dark guise. "And here I was hoping we were gonna have a tea party first."

Joey harshly staggered back from his scary stalker and pointed his pistol at him, his hands, though, trembling frantically.

"Get away from me! GET AWAY!" he cried, sounding almost horror-stricken.

Without even as much as moving a muscle, the vigilante just waved his left arm in a fluent, yet brisk motion. In the next second, the gun the criminal was holding in his shaking hands was knocked from them by a thrown Wing-Ding and dropped on the ground with a loud thud. Joey was so consternated by this that his legs almost sank under him from the shock and he started hectically backtracking from the masked man in front of him.

"No no no no no!" he started repeating over and over again. "No, please, don't hurt me!"

"Hey, relax already," the vigilante replied easily, catching the returned Wing-Ding on the fly and placing it back into his utility belt. "I know this may be hard for you to believe, but I really don't want to hurt you. I only want to talk."

However, Joey was not so easily convinced by someone who had just kicked the crap out of his entire gang.

"No no no, don't get close to me!" he went on blabbering and took out a pocket knife from his jeans, defensively bringing it forth at the vigilante in front of him.

The man in a mask sighed and shook his head in disappointment, expecting another pathetic attempt on the part of the criminal to attack him. However, much to his very unpleasant surprise, instead of trying to strike at him, the thug did something the vigilante turned out to be completely unprepared for. With the knife still in his hand, the mobster starkly crept toward one of the bound security guards that happened to lie right near him, braced his arm around his neck in a chokehold and pressed the blade to the hostage's throat.

"Don't move or I'll slit his throat!" he threatened the vigilante, the knife in his hand nervously shaking an inch away from the guard's Adam's apple.

This also managed to awake the bound guard from his blackout, who, upon barely opening open his eyelids and then seeing what was being done to him, bugged his eyes out in utter terror and started fervently shivering with his whole body. He tried to scream, but with his mouth gagged, all he was able to voice were some sullen mumbles of fright, which, nonetheless, sounded no less blood-curdling.

At the sight of this discouraging spectacle, the vigilante felt some stinging chill run down his spine.

" _ **I did not expect him to go so far as using one of the hostages as an equalizer in this confrontation. I should have known better than to start interrogating this dirtbag without subduing him first. Now a life of an innocent citizen is in danger, and if something happens to him, it will be no one else's fault but my own."**_

Agitated by this cognition, the man in a mask slowly raised his hands into the air, displaying his lack of hostility, and addressed himself to the criminal,

"Whoa whoa whoa! Easy there, tough guy! Don't do something we're both gonna deeply regret afterwards."

The vigilante then attempted to make one short step toward the duo of the thug and the hostage he was holding in his grip, but Joey immediately intercepted him.

"No, stop right there, I'm gonna slit his throat!" he shouted, pressing the knife's blade even tighter to the guard's neck. "You make one more step I swear I'm gonna spill his blood all over you!"

The vigilante at once froze on his spot, not making light of the criminal's threats.

"Alright, alright, just calm down, okay?" he returned, trying to maintain serene intonation. "Listen, man, you've got a problem with me, not with this guy. Just let him go, and I promise we'll just have a short chat and I won't even lay a finger on you."

"Go fuck yourself!" Joey spat at him, his eyes burning with a mixture of rage and anxiety. "I know better than to trust a word of a vigilante freak like you! If I release this wimp, you're gonna jump me the very second I do this."

Upon that phrase, the gangster got off his knees, lifting the hostage guard he was keeping in a chokehold together with him.

"I'm leaving," Joey spoke again. "And if you even try to follow me, I'm gonna give this guy a Columbian necktie. You understand me?"

The man in mask continued standing motionless, slowly entering into the mobster's words and trying to calculate a solution to his dilemma.

" _ **Even if this bastard has the guts to cross that line and jugulate the hostage, I can sense from his voice that right now he's much more focused on saving his own cowardly ass rather than trying to intimidate me with his threats. If I can push further on this string of his, maybe I'll manage to get him release the guard."**_

"I understand only that you'll probably have to drag this guy all the way to your home if you really wanna prevent me from following you," the vigilante remarked then with a subtle mockery. "Besides, if my memory serves me, you have a bad leg after that little stunt I pulled on you earlier. So even if you manage to get out of this building, I'm still gonna have no problem catching up with you outside."

Joey's eyes began to shift skittishly as he gave thought to the flaws of his plan that his enemy had pointed out to him. Seeing the conflict in his gaze, the vigilante proceeded,

"If you want to make sure I'll stop giving you a bad time, you'd better let the guard go and kill _me_ instead," he then declared to everybody's amazement.

Both the thug's and the hostage's eyes widened owlishly at this bold statement. To imagine that someone was ready to open himself to an attack like this was as hard as it seemed suspicious. Bewildered by the vigilante's unexpected proposal, Joey continued lingering for some more time, until suddenly it dawned upon him.

"Nice try, freak," he talked back with distrust, "But I won't let you fool me into fighting you when you have all those geeky toys to back you up."

He then tightened his arm's grip on the hostage and went on talking,

"Although you do have a point – I really need to kill you. But this will happen on _my_ terms, not yours."

With that, he directed his glance at the eskrima stick protruding from the holster on the vigilante's right calf.

"Your stick – put it down on the ground, slowly!" he ordered the man in a mask, his voice, though, still thrilling with panic.

The vigilante at once figured what the thug was up to, but decided not to wrangle with him.

"Okay, if that's what your problem is…" he replied flatly, but before he even reached for his holster, Joey barked at him again,

"And don't you even try to pull any fucking gimmicks!"

The masked man floutingly rolled his eyes at this warning.

"Oh, now you truly resent me," he fooled in return. "Do I look like someone who pulls…?"

"Shut your fucking mouth and do what I say!" the mobster cut him off, obviously being in no mood for jokes.

The vigilante quitted his attempts to take the heat out of the situation and just silently complied with the criminal's demand, carefully taking out his weapon and placing it on the floor by his right foot. However, the criminal was still not content with it.

"Now kick it to me – and no fucking monkey business!" Joey pressed on.

Again, the man in a mask obeyed inviolately and shoved his stick to the criminal with a weak foot-kick. The intricate gadget rolled toward Joey who, upon seeing it, carefully put his knife from his right hand into his left one with which he was holding the hostage by the neck and then bent down slightly, picking the weapon from the floor with his now free right hand. Then he tossed the stick away, ensuring it would be far beyond the vigilante's reach.

"Happy?" the vigilante asked him dryly then.

"Not yet," the criminal answered, his tone slowly growing more confident. "Now take off your belt and drop it on the ground."

The man in mask reacted by waving his hands in a gesture of annoyance.

"Oh come on, it won't even fit you!" he kidded again.

"Take off the fucking belt, NOW!" the gangster snapped at him, and, to emphasize his point, pressed the blade of his knife even tighter to the neck of the guard he was holding.

The vigilante had no other choice but to play by the criminal's rules yet another time. If it had been only his own life and health at risk here, he might have well chosen to drop this masquerade and play an all-or-nothing game. But this was not just about himself – it was also about an innocent Bank guard who had the ill-luck of getting caught in the crossfire.

"Fine, fine, whatever you say, _boss_ ," the man in mask jeered snidely in response to the criminal's order and started to unbutton his utility belt off his waist. "At least I'm glad you're not asking me to take off my pants as well."

Joey just continued steadily holding his ground, waiting until the man in a mask undid his belt with all the insidious gadgets stored in it and tossed it at the mobster's feet too. Then he picked it up from the floor and threw it away just like the kali stick before.

"So, are we done playing dress-up?" the vigilante asked him then challengingly, now left completely without any technological support.

"Not so fast, whacko job," the gangster snarled back, slowly starting to retrieve his former calmness. "You didn't think I would be so stupid as to clash with you without getting some backing-up of my own?

Upon saying this, Joey hastily dragged his hostage toward where his pistol lay dropped after the vigilante had knocked it from his hand with his Wing-Ding. He then gathered it up from the ground and pointed it at his dark rival standing in front of him. Even though his arm was still shaking with neurotic tremor, it was still visible that the thug was elated by how smoothly his plan had been working so far. Now, with the knife in his left hand still held to the hostage's throat and the gun in his right hand held directed at the vigilante, this criminal believed he had a full carte blanche in this situation.

However, the man in a mask didn't seem to be intimidated in the slightest and continued retaining stoic demeanor.

"Sound move, I'll give you that," he remarked imperturbably. "But allow me to give you one more advice if I may. My whole body is encased in bulletproof armor, so if you're intent upon sending me off to hell with that tiny little pistol of yours, I recommend you to shoot me at point-blank range."

Joey had to stand on his spot nearly petrified for a few moments to digest what the vigilante had told him. The masked man was almost guiding him right into killing himself as if the prospect of getting shot dead didn't bother him whatsoever. Either this guy was totally nuts or someway somehow he still had some ace hidden up his sleeve. The mobster wasn't sure what to make of it, but he refused to believe that while being unarmed, kept at gunpoint and leveraged by the hostage's life hanging on a thread right before his eyes, this freak could possibly come up with any secret game-plan.

"You're even crazier than I thought," Joey finally alleged after waking out of his stupor. "On the other hand, what is to be expected from a guy who dressed like some screwball faggot and thinks he take on an entire gang of armed-to-the-teeth men all by himself?"

Then the thug started slowly approaching the vigilante, still keeping the pistol in his right hand pointed at him and bracing the bank guard with his left arm around the neck.

"Anyway, thanks for the tip," the robber proceeded, still keeping on coming closer to the man in mask. "I guess I'll follow it after all. But, as always, I'm gonna add some improvements of my own to your recommendation."

The gangster then lifted his gun a bit, aiming its muzzle right at his opponent's face. The vigilante, however, continued standing immovably, not even blinking at the sight of a weapon directed at him.

"I'm not just gonna shoot you point-blank," Joey went on, already getting within almost a couple of feet away from the masked man, "I'm gonna shoot you point-blank straight into your stupid fucking head and blow all your freakish brains out!"

Finally, the criminal came almost within a hair's breadth to the vigilante and put his pistol right to his left temple. The man in a mask then heard the gun's safety lock becoming cocked back with a click that rang menacingly right above his ear. The tension of the moment seemed to have slowed the very fabric of time around the vigilante, but he would not yield to this illusionary effect, remembering all too well that every second counted for him now.

"Not sure about freakish," the masked man took the word again, still standing motionless at the barrel of a gun moments away from firing pot at his head, "But at least I have brains."

Then, within less than a blink of an eye, the unthinkable happened. In one unbelievably swift, bolting burst, the vigilante just slipped out of the way of the gun pointed at him. He moved so fast that his body seemed to blur through the air, almost as if he had literally teleported himself away. The robber could not believe his own eyes as one second he was looking directly at his enemy standing at an arm's length away from him with a pistol pressed to his head and the next second there was already nobody before him. It felt almost like some magic trick performed on him by an illusionist, only Joey didn't find much to be entertained about it.

The momentary perception sent a revived wave of fear through the criminal's very system, causing him to lose all the confidence he had been trying to build up within him for the past few minutes. Then, before his own instincts could even come into play and make him either pull the trigger of his gun or slice his knife across the hostage's throat, he abruptly felt his left hand getting roughly seized by the wrist and then becoming bent in a way it wasn't supposed to bend. By the time the thug managed to even react to this, the man in a mask was already behind his back, twisting his arm almost up to his shoulder. There was a loud sound of a joint getting snapped and Joey yelped plaintively, his hand reflexively releasing hold of the knife. At the same time, the bank guard he had been holding in his grip this entire time limply dropped on the ground in front of him face first, his legs probably having grown rubbery after all the shock he'd been through.

The robber, now having lost two of the trump cards that he had, desperately went for the last thing there was left for him to do and brought his right hand behind his head, looking to shoot his assailant at random. Unfortunately for him, the vigilante turned out to be prepared even for this kind of maneuver as he violently lumbered at Joey's right hand with his forearm, causing him to drop his pistol before he ever had a chance to fire it. When the weapon bumped against the floor, the man in a mask, without quitting hold of the criminal's arm he was twisting, also put his right foot on his popliteal muscle and pressed hard, forcing his enemy into kneeling position. Once Joey was down on his knees, disarmed and immobilized, the vigilante at once retrieved his former cocky attitude and addressed himself to his subdued rival,

"That's what I like about you, amateur hour goons – always so easy to lure into even the simplest trap."

The thug who now found himself at the mercy of the masked man was still refusing to accept his defeat and still kept on stubbornly trying to resist.

"Rrrrrr, let go off me, you bastard!" he grumbled, squirming with his whole body in futile attempts to break free.

The vigilante leaned his face right to the thug's head to voice his reply right into his ear.

"I was actually planning to let you go at first," he said, "But that was before you decided to put a hostage's life in danger. Now I'm gonna make you pay."

That threat managed to erase the last remnants of defiance from Joey, rendering him a pathetic, fearful coward again.

"Wh-what do you want from me?" he asked the vigilante, his voice thrilling with former panic.

"Luckily for you, not much," the man in a mask returned, "Just tell me who your gang is working for, and maybe I won't even put you in a full-body cast for the next few months."

The criminal started trembling even harder, clearly appalled by this question, but blurted out his answer as if having been trained for this very moment.

"We don't work for anyone – there are only eight of us and nobody else!"

"Don't bullshit me!" the vigilante hissed in return and angrily twisted the mobster's arm even further, thus causing him more pain. "A bunch of clowns like you would never pull off something that big without some criminal mastermind guiding your every step! So I will repeat my question: who do you work for? And this time I want the truth!"

Joey squealed from the agonizing feeling spreading from his left arm to the rest of his body, but didn't change his story.

"Drop dead! I don't even know what the hell you're talking about!" he squeezed out of himself through pain.

The man in a mask clicked his tongue, displaying his exasperation.

"Oh really?" he asked provokingly. "So we're gonna play this game, huh? Okay, that's _your_ choice, not mine."

Upon saying this, the vigilante grabbed Joey by the index finger of the very arm he was twisting him now. Sensing his tight grip on his finger, the thug shuddered in alarm.

"What the hell are you doing?" he insistently inquired his victimizer.

"Listen, man, I've told you already – I don't wanna hurt you," the vigilante returned, trying to sound almost friendly. "And I know you don't want me to hurt your either. But the problem is that I need information, and I'm not leaving this place until I get it. So if you're gonna continue playing dumb with me, I'm afraid I won't have other choice."

The thug's eyes started nervously shifting again, his whole body sweating underneath his outfit from both physical and mental strain.

"You're crazy! You're not getting away with this!" he shouted at the man in a mask.

"That's not an answer to my question," his interlocutor retorted and placed his thumb on the proximal phalanx of the criminal's finger, then pressed it hard.

There was a loud crunching sound and the robber emitted the most ear-shattering shriek of affliction that seemed to have reverberated through the entire building. His whole palm twitched spasmodically, all its fingers becoming bent unnaturally.

"Aaaaaaaarrrrrghhhhh, what have you done to me?" Joey screamed almost in tears from the unbearable pain and many other unpleasant feelings he was experiencing along with it.

"Nothing serious yet," the man in a mask replied lightly, still holding the thug by the arm, "But you have only nine more fingers left before it can get so. Now tell me the name of your boss, or I'm gonna continue my way onto the serious part."

"Alright, alright, I'll tell you, just stop, please!" the criminal begged, almost choking on his own sobs. "His name is Blockbuster!"

Upon hearing that name, the vigilante had to turn his gaze away in distant reverie, trying to extract from his old memories if he had already come across it before. It sure sounded very familiar, but for now, he couldn't precisely recall where it originated from.

"Blockbuster?" he asked the gangster again. "Sounds more like a nickname to me. I need his real name."

"I don't know his real name!" Joey answered whiningly. "He never told it to us! I swear!"

The man in a mask was very skeptical about how truthful was what this thug had to say, especially after his sordid attempt to use a hostage as a means to an end. However, judging by the utter dread resonating in every word he spoke, the vigilante was more or less adamant that now the criminal was not lying.

"Where can I find him?" the vigilante continued to question his examinant.

"I don't know!" the mobster hid his head again. "Blockbuster's never invited us to his place! Whenever he needed something from us, he just sent his own men to meet with us at random locations! Please, you have to believe me!"

The vigilante frowned angrily at this unenlightening reply, but didn't go on torturing the criminal further. Perhaps, that Blockbuster really kept all those goons in the dark in order to preserve his own secrecy.

"The money that you were going to steal from here – where were you supposed to take it to?" the man in a mask put another question to Joey. "And don't you even try to tell me you don't know that as well!"

"No, no, I'll tell you, just don't hurt me anymore!" the thug pleaded with him. "We were supposed to take it to a warehouse at City Dock-Commercial! That's all I know!"

That piece of information caused the man in a mask to delve into more thoughts.

" _ **I'm still new here in Blüdhaven and do not orient in this city as well as I do in Gotham. However, a location of this sort shouldn't be too hard to find. If I can do this fast enough, maybe I'll manage to catch Blockbuster's men at the docks before they figure out that the bank robbery has been a bust and decide to tail to their heels from there."**_

Now having a new objective in view, the vigilante relinquished his grip off Joey's arm, letting him fall down on the ground right next to the bank guard he'd been holding hostage earlier.

"You were very educational, thank you," the vigilante said dryly to the criminal who was now lying hunched-up on the floor at his feet, moaning and clutching at his numb arm.

"Ooooh my hand – I can't feel it…" the robber whimpered, still squeezing his hand in an attempt to make the blood flow return to it.

"Relax, you big baby – it's not even broken," the vigilante teased him and then leaned over the thug, once again snatching him by the wrist. "Let me help you here."

Before Joey even gave his permission to do something to him, the vigilante already pressed his thumb on the very same spot of the criminal's hand he pressed on before when interrogating him. Again, a crunching sound was heard, making the mobster skirl another painful cry.

"Aaaaaahhh, you're a fucking butcher!" the gangster bawled out, still holding onto his hand.

"Hey, that's not very grateful of you," the man in a mask pretended to be offended. "You should be feeling better already."

Joey didn't reply anything to this and just continued to wallow on the ground and weep for his hurting arm. Seeing that he no longer represented a problem, the vigilante was already about to start taking care of other things like untying the bound security guards and securing the rest of the gangsters before the police arrived. But then, all of a sudden, something else caught his attention. Lying on the floor right near the criminal's leg he saw some small white thing that looked like a card. The man in a mask quickly picked it up and studied it in a closer look. It was made of plastic and had a magnetic coating like that of a pass-card. Then he turned it sideways and got reassured in his suspicion. The card had a title inscription 'Blüdhaven Bank' running along the upper part of its long side and a distinctive watermark symbol of a 'B' letter within a circle frame like the one he's seen above the entrance to the Bank showing on its background. The left side of the card had a photo of the employee it belonged to with lots of holographic lines and stamps placed over it, while the right side showed the information on him. The vigilante, though, focused his gander only on the four words in bold letters that read the name of the card's owner and his job position: Joey McIntyre, security guard.

Having scrutinized this information, the vigilante switched his glance back to the thug lying half-crooked in front of him. The dark hero knitted his eyebrows together in a grimace of intense thinking process and then sharply grasped the criminal by the tissue of the mask he wore, taking it off his head in one brisk move. The mobster who clearly hadn't expected this kind of action freightenedly clutched his head with both hands, afraid that his foe was about to continue tormenting him. However, the only thing the vigilante intended to do now was to compare the face of the robber with the photo on the pass card. Although the picture must have been taken a good several years from today and the man imprinted on it didn't have the gnarly bristle, the greasy, sweaty hair and the pale, haggard face like the one lying in front of the vigilante right now, the similarity of appearance was still unmistakable. Once the man in a mask picked on this, he felt a very enkindling feeling of enlightenment fill him up.

" _ **At last, all the questions I have been having up until this very moment have become answered all at once. Now it is finally clear to me how these mobsters were able to break into the Bank without wrenching open any of the doors or even stirring the alarms. This gang had a double agent at the Bank in the person of this very guy before me who's been working here as a security guard. He must have provided the access to the premise to his gang-mates and also helped take out the rest of the security personnel, ensuring none of them could even call the police when it happened. A very sordid method of doing things even by criminal standards, but undoubtedly efficient nonetheless."**_

With these inferences drawn, the vigilante looked at the robber in front of him from a refreshed perspective.

"Joey McIntyre, a security guard at Blüdhaven Bank," the masked man said as if willing to state the fact. "I'd love to say it's nice to meet you, but I'm afraid I can't do this."

With an effort, Joey rose to a half-sitting position in response to that comment. He was no longer as panic-stricken as before, but he still appeared a broken and distraught man. It was also notable that he was not even trying to come up with any further means of neutralizing the vigilante as if having truly accepted his defeat.

"Congratulations, Mr. Sherlock Holmes," the former bank guard declared venomously. "Took you long enough to figure out."

The vigilante disregarded Joey's remark, continuing to explicate his previous thought.

"I don't even know what disgusts me more about you," he went on rebuking the criminal, "The fact that you tried to manipulate me by threatening an innocent man's life or that you've been manipulating so many other people around you for such a long time just to make yourself and your fellow goons rich."

Joey rudely wiped the sweat on his forehead with a sleeve of his leather jacket.

"Don't you dare judge me, freak," he objected to the masked man's accusations. "You weren't born and raised in Blüdhaven like I was. You have no idea what's it like to live in this city."

The former bank guard sobbed, as if being on the verge of bursting into tears, then proceeded,

"You don't understand what it's like to live here and have ho future… no opportunities… no hope… You don't understand what it's like to struggle every single day while being in constant fear that tomorrow you won't have a job, what to eat and where to live... or that you won't be killed in some dirty alley by a whacked-out street punk... Believe it or not, but I have a family waiting for me at home that I have to take care of, and I can't possibly do this with these pathetic fucking pittances that this Bank is paying me for being its security guard. All I'm trying to do is turn things for the better for me and my family..."

"...By hurting and terrorizing innocent citizens, stealing from other families like yours that may have the exact same problems and serving despicable criminal scumbags like this Blockbuster who built their entire lives upon other people's sufferings?" the vigilante interrupted him. "Well, forgive me if I don't find your approach worth being sympathized with."

"I could care less about your sympathizing," Joey talked back. "It's not my fault that there's no other way to survive in this city."

"There's always another way," the man in a mask retorted confidently. "It's just people like you who are so much blinded by their anger and frustration that they fail to see one."

The renegade bank guard didn't seem to find a counterargument for this and just swallowed that statement silently. When the vigilante realized that no response was going to follow to his last tirade, he shifted his focus from Joey to other pressing issues at hand. With that, he gathered the knife that Joey had dropped on the ground during their clash and walked with it toward the bound bank guard that his former partner tried to use as a counterweight. Then the vigilante started using the knife to cut the ropes the guard was pinioned with.

The sight of the man in a mask helping his former co-worker made Joey voice some more reflections of his.

"Whatever another way you're talking about, now that you ruined our operation here, there's only one way left," he said solemnly. "When Blockbuster finds out that we failed, he'll kill us all, and that's the only way there is to it."

"Don't worry," the vigilante returned in an unimpressed tone, not taking his attention off the guard he was disentangling. "By the time your Boss finds out about your operation, you will have already been safe in your jail cells."

Joey chuckled at this, for the first time displaying some emotion other than fear or despair.

"You really don't understand, do you?" he messed with the man in a mask, thus finally succeeding in attracting his notice. "Blockbuster is no ordinary gang leader. He controls this whole city. He controls everything, including police stations and prisons. If he really wants to find someone, he's gonna go to the end of the earth to get this somebody, just like he's gonna do with us, and, eventually, with you too."

The vigilante finished cutting the ropes the bank guard was tied with and rose from his knees. Then he turned to Joey to once again look him in the eyes.

"Not if I'm gonna get him first," he declared with loftiness worthy of some legendary medieval warrior.

Joey just scoffed at this statement again, clearly not placing much faith in the words of the mysterious masked hero.

"Can't stop repeating this: you're crazy," the former security guard mocked him yet another time.

Then, suddenly, the criminal gathered his brows together in puzzlement at one question that very spontaneously arose with him.

"Just who the hell are you anyway?" he asked the vigilante straightforwardly, surprised with himself why he hadn't wondered about this earlier.

The man in a mask, who was already on his way to another captive guard, half-turned to Joey, his face cracking a sly smile,

"Oh I'm sorry, I'm sorry, where are my manners?" the vigilante camped around in his typical manner. "Guess I got so carried away by fooling around with you guys that totally forgot to introduce myself."

Then the masked man stood to face Joey, his shoulders thrown back and his head lifted up high.

"I'm Nightwing," he made himself known at last. "And I'm here to clean this city of the people that taint it like your Boss does."


	2. Chapter 2: The More Things Change

**Author's note:** _At last, the finalized Chapter 2 is complete and now you can view this installment in its entirety. I must admit that I was pleasantly surprised with the slight improvement of the situation with feedback, which really motivated me to make this piece as awesome as possible. Nonetheless, I still urge everyone to be more active with reviewing and always try to provide at least some feedback after reading. It's really very very VERY important for me. Other than this, I really hope you're going to like the continuation of the current plot-line that was left off at the end of Chapter 2._

 _Thank you for your attention and now, onward with 'Nightwing Extreme',_

* * *

 **Chapter 2: The More Things Change**

 _ **Gotham City – 2 years ago**_

Richard "Dick" Grayson was standing in queue full of students wearing black gowns and mortarboards with tassels. The queue was slowly, but steadily walking up the stairs leading to a hastily constructed wooden stage as one by one their names were announced into a microphone. There, on the stage, the fresh graduates awkwardly shook hands with no one else but the very President of Gotham State University who would proudly hand to them their long-desired diplomas they had been working so hard for during the four years of their study. The precious moment would always be accompanied by a burst of applauses coming from a large audience of supporters sitting in front of the stage. Parents, grandparents, sisters, brothers, aunts, uncles, nephews, friends, boyfriends and girlfriends – all were there to give their appreciation and support to those they had come here for. And, of course, every graduate to appear on the stage was very receptive to hearing his or her own closest in the midst of this squall of clapping hands.

At some point, the Assistant to President announced the name "Richard Grayson", also adding to it the prestigious award "With highest honors." The moment Dick heard those words he felt his heart sink in his chest. He then found himself surprised with his own reaction. After many years of fighting crime alongside Gotham's infamous protector known as Batman and his colleagues from the Justice League, as well as leading his own team of teenage superheroes called 'The Teen Titans' which crime-fighting activity often spread far beyond not just the borders of Gotham, but even planet Earth, he probably shouldn't have been so much stirred by such a mundane event. And yet here was, anxious and excited like any other ordinary young man in his place would be. He had to admit he liked this uncustomary feeling of normality. Not that he didn't love his life of a vigilante hero, but from time to time, it didn't hurt to remember that he was just an ordinary 21-year old guy with the same goals and ambitions like the absolute majority of his coevals.

As Dick marched his way up the stairs toward his moment of glory, the memories of various highlights of his very unusual and very eventful life started running through his mind. Even though he was just a human with no superpowers or other extraordinary abilities, sometimes it was easy for him to forget it, because the life's path he had walked up until this moment defied any notions of normality most ordinary people had. Born in a family of circus acrobats known as 'The Flying Graysons', Dick spent his early childhood on the road, constantly traveling across the country with the rest of Haly's circus where his family was employed and performing on stage for large audiences. Then, on one tragic night, both his parents were killed right before his eyes by a crime boss named Tony Zucco who was trying to extort money from Haly's circus. This tragedy was also witnessed by Bruce Wayne, a prominent Gotham billionaire who later adopted the 12-year old orphaned Dick as his legal ward.

Living under the same roof with Wayne eventually led Dick to discovering his legal guardian's darkest secret – his second identity as Batman, the vigilante in a cape and a mask that made life hard for criminals all over Gotham City and beyond. With his mystery revealed to Dick, Bruce offered the boy an opportunity of a lifetime – to become his sidekick in crime fighting. Still feeling responsibility for his parents' death and willing to reconcile with his guilt this way, Dick accepted the offer. Since that day, his life had never been the same again. Under the tactful guidance of his mentor, Dick received the most extensive training in a dozen types of various martial arts, along with other non-combative disciplines and techniques. Aside from training of body, Bruce also made sure that his adopted son got the finest education his money could afford. Dick was thoroughly tutored in all most important spheres of knowledge, which gave him fluency in a multitude of different foreign languages, as well as proficiency in social and domestic sciences, technology, chemistry and many other subjects.

Long years of intense training and study ultimately paid off, and at the age of fifteen, the young Dick Grayson finally became Batman's sidekick called Robin - a name that would some day become generic. From then onward, the two vigilantes had become inseparable, turning into what people would later start calling 'the Dynamic Duo'. The infamous Dark Knight welcomed the Boy Wonder into his grim, dangerous and complicated world of crime fighting, and Dick fitted into this world surprisingly well, proving himself a very capable and talented vigilante and a dependable and loyal partner. Together, the two had put hundreds of criminals behind bars, including some of the world's most dangerous supervillains, as well as saved thousands of innocent lives and become the living symbols of justice and hope not only for citizens of Gotham, but for people of other cities across the whole world too.

However, Dick wasn't the kind of person that was going to be content with staying in the shadow of the Bat forever. As his character continued to evolve and mature, so did the ambitions he had. With every following year spent under the wing of the Dark Knight, the young man kept striving for more and more independence. The path toward achieving that ambition was first laid when he started acquainting himself with other eminent heroes that would influence his attitude and personality. Among those was a group of other teenage crime-fighters like himself which he later took leadership of as part of Teen Titans – a superhero team which also managed to leave a notable imprint in the legacy of heroism. While in charge of that team, Dick had also been able to gain a reputation of a strong, resolute and responsible leader with uncannily highly developed tactician and strategist skills for a person of his age. This earned the young vigilante not only more admiration from the people he saved and protected, but the respect of other well-deserved heroes, many of which used to be his own idols to look up to.

By the time Dick turned eighteen, he had already spent a more eventful and dramatic life than most people four times older than him ever could. However, just because he had already managed to establish himself as a hero didn't stop him from willing to continue establishing himself as a person as well. Aside from the life of a crime-fighter, Dick wanted to have a life of a normal human being with ordinary day-to-day aims and objectives. Therefore, after graduating from high school, Dick decided to continue his education by getting a college degree. His first choice was Faculty of Law at Hudson University in New York, but at the supreme moment he dismissed this idea, realizing that moving to a new town and leaving Gotham for at least four whole years was not a decision he would be happy with in the long run. Whereas there was never any doubt in his mind that his mentor would be just fine keeping the city safe on his own during his absence, the idea of leaving the Robin mantle and mask hanging up for so long didn't sit well with him. So Dick entered Gotham State University instead in order to be able to combine the studies of law with his primary job of a Gotham's protector.

Being a student by day and a vigilante by night turned out to be tougher than Dick had expected. This was no longer the comfortable home schooling system he used to have during his youngster years when private tutors could arrive at the Wayne Manor at any time when it was convenient for him or wait for the young boy to be through with his training first. Now Dick was forced to learn how to work fast and balance out the two bipolar lives he had. Skipping classes, making up ridiculous excuses for lecturers, failing tests and exams which resulted in huge academic arrears, studying at night to make up for what had been missed during the day and constantly getting chewed out by the university administration for all of the afore-said – all this could be tenuous at times even to someone whose everyday life included things like single-handedly taking on entire gangs of armed-to-the-teeth thugs or rescuing hostages from mine-studded buildings. Nobody from Dick's immediate circle, including Bruce, believed that the young man could handle the fast lane of leading a double life like this. But Dick was of firm belief that as long as he wasn't a metahuman or an alien from another planet, there was still a chance for him at having a normal life along the one of crime fighting. Therefore, the young vigilante remained hell-bent on proving everyone around him wrong in this regard.

Defying the odds came to the young man at a price, though. In order to be effective at being both a student of GSU and the Boy Wonder, Dick had to quit being the leader of Teen Titans. It was a decision that came hard to him, but he knew that the group would continue to live even without him because we was handing its fate into the hands of his former team-mates – the people he trusted with his very life and could always count on. After leaving Teen Titans, getting the hang of the crazy pace of his double life became a bit easier. Dick managed to quickly make up the leeway in his studies and even make his way into one of the University's top students. These academic achievements, however, hadn't affected the quality of his job as Robin as he continued to efficiently handle every crime-fighting task he would deal with and maintain order on the streets of Gotham. Eventually, even Bruce had to admit how well Dick became at managing the two of his identities at the same time. Soon the Dark Knight stopped trying to spare his protégé's time and strengths and resumed to engage Dick as his crime-fighting partner at full pace.

The final point in solidifying his life of an ordinary person was getting a stable relationship – a thing that most people believed to be impossible for anyone sharing Dick's agenda. Of course, through all the years spent in a cape and a mask, Dick had had a few relationships, but none of them were serious or long-term. This time, however, it turned out to be a different story. During the fourth year of his study at GSU, Dick met a new girl at the Faculty of Law who he almost instantly fell in love with. Her name was Barbara Gordon. She was a first-year student at GSU and a daughter of the Commissioner of the Gotham City Police Department, James Gordon – a person that Dick had communicated with quite a lot as Robin, but had met only a few times as Dick Grayson. Barbara was a lovely, charming 18-year old young lady, smart and kind-hearted, with very dynamic personality and a lot of passion for helping other people. She also had quite a mystery in herself that made her an evermore attractive girl and an extremely interesting person to share a relationship with. Hundreds of guys at GSU would have loved to become her boyfriends, but of all the potential candidates for this role, she only chose Dick Grayson. Despite knowing nothing about his secret identity as Batman's sidekick, Barbara still considered Dick a hero in his own way, admiring everything about him from his mature, responsible, strong-willed personality to his handsome appearance, high intelligence and good sense of humor. It also helped that the two shared a lot in common, having similar visions on life and moral values, including their burning desire to make the world around them a better place to live in.

This was a brief summary of Richard Grayson's life that he quickly refreshed in his memory within those few seconds he was approaching the GSU's President. Going through all these recollections and analyzing their meaning made Dick experience a feeling he had stopped being accustomed to ever since his parents died – happiness. The realization made the young man smile and cast his gaze to the side of the audience. Of all the people sitting there, his sharp blue eyes quickly singled out the ones to have come to this event in his support. Those were the two of the most important persons in his whole life.

One of them was, of course, Barbara, looking as beautiful as ever in her black evening dress that perfectly set off her pleasant womanly figure and her magnificent long red hair. The girl was on her feet for her dear boyfriend, boldly waving her hand so Dick could see her through the crowd. Her emerald green eyes seemed to radiate with joy and elation at the sight of Dick's moment of triumph. Seeing this made the young man once again fathom how lucky he was to have someone like Barbara in his life. The two of them had been together for almost half a year already, and so far this was the longest relationship the young man ever had in his life. However, Dick also remembered that he still hadn't told Barbara about his other life as the Boy Wonder yet. So far their relationship had been working out nearly flawlessly, and part of him was concerned that telling Barbara such a dark secret would inevitably have an impact on the love and trust they had been building between themselves for the past six months – something he clearly didn't wish at this point. On the other hand, deep down inside, Dick felt that Barbara was the kind of person that would find enough kindness and compassion within herself to understand that such sort of a mystery wasn't an easy thing to share with anybody. But one thing he was adamant of was that one day he would definitely find enough courage within himself to reveal the truth to this girl. And with every day spent together with her, he could feel that he was getting closer and closer toward making that serious step.

To the left of Barbara was sitting another person that Dick held dear to his heart. This was Alfred Pennyworth, Bruce Wayne's butler at Wayne Manor, and, plurastically, their most loyal ally in crime-fighting. He was an angular-looking old Englishman with grey hair and thin moustache, dressed in black tuxedo with a white shirt and a black bowtie. He was sitting there in a composed and imperturbable manner, calmly and ceremoniously applauding to Dick with weak, quiet clapping of his gloved hands. However, a distinctive blink in the eyes of this man which Dick had come to learn over the years spent together with him at Wayne Manor was displaying what his perfect English manners were trying to hide. Alfred was shining with pride for the young 'Master Dick', as the former himself would love to call him, and relished in Dick's glory no less than Barbara did.

As the young graduate focused his stare on the jubilant yet restrained Alfred, he couldn't help chuckling aloud at the thoughts that accompanied the visage of this man. If only anyone around could have had even the slightest idea of what this polished façade of a mannered old English gentleman was disguising. A former British intelligence agent that was forced to retire due to his age, Albert used to work as a butler for Bruce's parents, Thomas and Martha Wayne. After Thomas and Martha were murdered, Alfred became Bruce's legal guardian - so much like it was with Bruce and Dick decades later. As such, Alfred was the first one to learn about Bruce's fateful decision to become a vigilante in a mask one day. Having sworn an oath to Bruce's parents to protect their son at all costs should something have happened to them, Alfred did his best to dissuade his ward out of this crazy idea. But when it became clear that the stubborn billionaire was not going to change his mind about this, the least Alfred could do was to aid 'Master Bruce' in his very dangerous and difficult activity.

However, Albert did so much more than just looked after the Wayne Manor while its owner was away on his missions. Having proven to be unbelievably resourceful and capable for a man of his age, Albert had no trouble maintaining all the equipment and devices stored at the Batcave, which sometimes even included performance of some reparatory, engineering and programming works by him. His proficiency in emergency medical techniques had saved Bruce's life on more than a few occasions when the latter got severely injured or wounded. Moreover, Alfred's past as the intelligence operative made him an expert in a variety of martial arts – a skill he could still successfully apply for regardless of his age if a situation demanded that. But the skillfulness and professionalism was not what Dick admired most about this man. Whereas it was Bruce's decision to adopt him as his legal ward, it had been no one else but Alfred all along that had been taking the most care of Dick and trying to make him feel like a true member of the Wayne family. Through all the years, Alfred had been treating Dick not as some outside orphan, but as his own grandson, and Dick had also come to adore this man like his own flesh and blood.

And, finally, next to Alfred there was another seat which, however, was vacated. This seat was reserved for no one other than Bruce Wayne, who, unfortunately, wasn't here now. This finding made Dick's festive mood go down a bit. He couldn't say that he was that much surprised with Bruce's non-appearance at his graduation. On the contrary, ditching such kinds of 'useless' events in favor of chasing mobsters or investigating crime scenes had always been quite a habit of his. However, this time Dick had a feeling that there was more to it than just Bruce's callous nature. Recently, the Dynamic Duo hadn't been getting along well with each other. Even though Dick and Bruce had always been contrasting personalities, similar to each other only, perhaps, in their common suffering from the loss of their parents, lately the Dark Knight had become more distanced from his sidekick than ever. Bruce seemed to be growing angrier, harsher and more enclosed with every following day, although there appeared to be no particular reason for such behavior of his. Dick, on the other hand, began to strive to spend as little time in the company of his mentor as possible, preferring to take care of his business all by himself. Notwithstanding that the two still worked together and continued to effectively stop criminals in a collectively effort, recently it had started to look more like a forced alliance and less like a partnership built on mutual trust and respect. It also didn't help that the two had plenty of disagreements as to their views on how crime fighting was supposed to be done. Dick disapproved of Batman's cruel, cold-hearted methods of obtaining information from criminals, like torturing, threatening or scaring them within an inch of their lives. Bruce, in his turn, criticized the young vigilante for being too emotional, short-sighted and insubordinate. The growing lack of common ground was rapidly drawing the two men apart. Nonetheless, even with all this taken into account, it was still hard for Dick to accept that Bruce would not show up at a time when his support was so important to him...

Having noticed the slight shift in Dick's facial expression, Barbara quickly figured out what had caused it. Then she glimpsed toward the empty seat near Alfred. This made the young lady finally bring up the issue to the butler.

"Dick will be crushed to know that Mr. Wayne missed the event," she whispered to Alfred without even trying to hide the blatant disgruntlement in her voice. "Where is he anyway?"

Alfred sighed, seeming to feel equally disappointed, but trying not to display it.

"Perhaps, stuck in a traffic jam," the loyal butler came up with a weak excuse for his master.

Barbara only rolled her eyes at that answer.

"Oh come on, he's a billionaire for God's sake!" the girl boiled over, "He could have easily afforded a helicopter if he really wanted to get here in time! It's Dick's graduation day – what can be so damn urgent that he has to skip it for this?"

In response to that squall of reproaches toward Bruce, Alfred turned his head to Barbara, giving her a very serious and stern look that even made the young lady feel a little uncomfortable. Then he replied to her tirade in his usual measured and polite tone,

"Miss Gordon, with all due respect, you don't know Master Bruce as well as I do. And believe me when I tell you that he would have never missed Master Dick's graduation ceremony unless having some very sufficient reason for this."

Alfred's unobjectionable remark made Barbara feel slightly chastened as she ashamedly dropped her eyes.

"I'm sorry, Mr. Pennyworth," the girl said without her former flak. "You're probably right."

The old Englishman smiled friendly at her.

"It's okay, Miss Gordon," he returned in an understanding voice. "And, by the way, I would be grateful if you didn't refer to me as 'Mr. Pennyworth' but instead simply called me Alfred. You and Master Dick have been dating for such a long time already you've almost become a part of the Wayne family. Therefore, I don't see much need for these familiarities between us."

This comment made Barbara lift her gaze back up and smile again.

"That would be great," she replied gladsomely, but then suddenly added in a very strict manner, "Only on one condition."

The butler wonderingly raised his eyebrows at Barbara's last line.

"And what condition would that be?" he asked with genuine interest.

"If you stop referring to me as 'Miss Gordon' and start calling me Barbara too," the girl returned and her snow-white smile widened again.

Alfred tried hard to retain his even-tempered demeanor, but then couldn't help bursting out laughing at the 'condition' that had been laid out to him. Barbara who had been barely refraining from laughing this entire time as well also joined her interlocutor in this process.

"Oh dear, you're a character, indeed," the Englishman said once he was able to recollect himself. "Very well, 'Barbara' it is, then."

"Thanks, Alfred," the girl responded coyly.

The funny conversation managed to lighten Barbara's mood up, making her forget about her dissatisfaction with Mr. Wayne's failure to attend her boyfriend's graduation. Alfred, however, wasn't just as easily appeased as the girl in this regard. Even though he had defended Master Bruce from the young lady's rebukes like a loyal butler should have, deep down inside he was just as disappointed with his former ward as Barbara was, if not more. Of course, it sure wasn't the first time when Bruce disregarded such events because of his undivided fixation on his job as Batman. But this time the butler had a feeling it was more than just another display of his master's hard-boiled character. Alfred had certainly noticed the tension that had been building up between Dick and Bruce recently. The two had had their share of conflicts before, but never had the hostility between them seemed so palpable. Part of him wanted to hope that this was just a relationship crisis both of them were going through now, and with enough time and patience, it would be overcome. But the other part of him was concerned that this might have been the beginning of the end for their bond – not just as for Batman and Robin, but as for Bruce Wayne and Dick Grayson too...

* * *

 ** _Blüdhaven – present time_**

The gloomy sights of Blüdhaven's streets were rapidly blurring before Dick's eyes as he was streaking through them on his Wingcycle – a highly advanced technological counterpart of an ordinary feet forwards power cruiser motorcycle. A fruit of collective effort of both Dick himself and Lucius Fox – a business manager at Wayne Enterprise and Bruce Wayne's secret ally who for many years had been providing the Gotham billionaire and his team of sidekicks with various unique engineering solutions for their crime fighting activity – the Wingcycle was designed on the basis of the famous limited edition of Honda NM4 model as well as the motorbike that Dick used to drive back in his days of being Robin. Equipped with a 1340 cc turbo-shaft engine and producing around 500 horsepower, the Wingcycle could reach about 350 mph when on top speed, which made it one of the fastest two-wheeled motor vehicles in the whole world, perfectly fitting for pursuing criminals through the crowded streets of large metropolitan cities. However, as Dick kept crossing an alleyway after an alleyway, he was gradually coming to realization that he didn't really need the full potential of his bike's unmatched speed right now. The numerous streets he was blisteringly traversing through were completely devoid of any people walking in them or even any cars driving across their roads. It was almost as if the entire city's population was gone – utterly exterminated by some global catastrophe or having become extinct.

 ** _"Empty, barren streets with no passer-bys or even rolling transport, almost like in some kind of a ghost town. The citizens of Blüdhaven were in such great terror of their lives that they even took no chances being outdoors at such a late hour. These poor people desperately needed someone to protect them from all the dangers the streets of their city posed."_**

The city's desolation might have been a disheartening spectacle to take in, but thanks to the lack of pedestrians and vehicles in his way, the vigilante had already been able to safely cover half the distance toward his destination point, the City-Dock Commercial. According to that Joey guy he had interrogated earlier at Blüdhaven Bank, it was there that Blockbuster's men were supposed to take the stolen money from his gang. The location was unknown to Dick, but with the help of the high-tech navigation devices installed in his bike, the masked hero had no trouble mapping a route toward his target. The City-Dock Commercial happened to be situated in the northeastern part of the town, having an outlet to the waters of the Atlantic Ocean. With this goal set and the path toward it being clean, Nightwing had now only one concern left on his mind: reaching the docks before Blockbuster's henchmen could suspect something and escape from there.

After about ten more minutes of cycling his way through the city's deserted roads, Dick finally began to see the maritime territory on the horizon. Blüdhaven was an insular town with well over two-third of its territory surrounded by water. Because of that, buildings like docks, seaports, river terminals and shipyards was something the coastal area of this town had aplenty. Finding specifically the City-Dock Commercial among all those structures would probably be like looking for a needle in a haystack. Even though the vigilante had the coordinates of the intended location displayed on his navigator's screen, he realized that figuring it out on terrain would still require some searching to do. Therefore, Nightwing resolutely twisted his bike's throttle to add more gas to the engine and then sharply turned to the side of the coastal area.

The masked hero kept his eyes wide open as he was driving past various wharfs, harbors and berths to the right of him, the bright LED headlight of his Wingcycle illuminating the dark road before him. All structures he was hurriedly running his gaze along looked very similar to each other, having nearly identical construction styles with repetitive one-type vessels moored to their water areas. And as the roller on his navigator's display kept approaching the destination point he had entered into the system's searching field, the vigilante kept growing evermore worried over his chances of singling out the City-Dock Commercial among all the buildings erected on the inshore base. Dick realized that if he was to get close to the right structure without even knowing that, he might have inadvertently revealed himself to whoever he was trying to catch red-handed there. This would have rendered all the efforts he had put into getting there in time completely void.

Luckily for the vigilante, the concerns that had been bugging him this entire time did not prove true, when at some point he spotted a large warehouse-like building in the distance of about fifty yards ahead. Brightened by the light of the nearby street lamps, the huge signboard on the side of that building read the words in capital letters that Dick had been aching so much to see all along – 'CITY-DOCK COMMERCIAL'. Just as the masked hero had surmised earlier before, this place was a significant location in Blüdhaven and thus had its own distinctive marks that made it an outstanding structure against all the others in this area. The undesirable prospect of having to wander in the dark while seeking out his target had officially fallen off, and now Dick could finally focus on further following the trails of the bank robbery.

Nightwing sharply pulled the brake, causing his motorcycle to skid to a gruff stop, its rear part swinging forth for a quarter turn by inertia and its no-longer-bowling wheels revealing their rims to be decorated with the same symbol of a blue bird that the vigilante carried on his armor's breastplate. Then the masked hero deadened his bike's loud engine a bit and reached for his night binoculars to study the object ahead in greater detail. The Wingcycle might have been an invaluable asset in terms of covering long distances within very short time periods, but like almost any other ordinary bike, it had a very noisy motor – a thing that could be real harmful to Dick's disguise if he wanted to catch Blockbuster's men at the docks by surprise. That was, of course, provided that they were still there.

As the young vigilante continued viewing the imposing construction in the distance, further doubts caused by its outward continued crossing his mind.

 ** _"As much as I'm glad that the City-Dock Commercial turned out to be such an easy place to find, it raises another question with me: why would this Blockbuster pick such an eye-catching location for carrying out his dirty deeds? Why not use any other neighboring dock that would not attract so much attention? This doesn't seem like a pattern of a brilliant criminal mastermind he's rumored to be. Could it be that that former-security-guard-turned-criminal Joey simply lied to me about this building being the endpoint of his gang's crime traffic? What if this whole City-Dock Commercial thing is just a fairy tale Blockbuster taught his men to tell in case they get busted by the police or someone else? Or maybe there's just something about specifically this place that brought Blockbuster to making his choice in favor of it? The number of variants seems to be close to infinite, but to find the only correct one I need to continue my investigation."_**

Encompassed by all the questions the sight of the City-Dock Commercial was triggering with him, Nightwing went on surveying the building's façade further until he took note of another peculiarity. Whereas the neighboring docks had no less than at least two or three vessels moored to their lines, the City-Dock Commercial was an exception in this regard, having only one lonely barge docked in its rear area. It was strange that such a prominent place specifying in handling of waterborne transport was so ascetic on having more boats or ships harbored within its space. The thought made Dick shift his glance toward the barge and study it as well. The vessel looked to be empty, with no cargo loaded on it yet, or, possibly, already unloaded off it on the docks. Its lanterns were off as well, as if the barge was now standing idle. However, thanks to the night vision mode of his binoculars, the vigilante was also able to see what the cover of darkness could shelter from a naked eye. Standing on the board of the barge was a man holding a machinegun in his hands. He was not wearing a mask like those mobsters at the Bank, but something about his stance and posture still suggested that this man did not play on the good guy team.

 ** _"Awake in the middle of the night and armed with a machinegun – all for the sake of simply watching over an empty barge? Something's telling me that this guy is more than just a security guard conscientious to performing his duty."_**

The masked hero still had plenty of reservations as to what was going on here, but at least now he knew what he had to do next. If that man standing on the barge really was involved with Blockbuster's criminal operation, then Dick would interrogate him and make him tell everything he knew about his Boss and where the latter could be hiding at the moment. With this mindset, the vigilante got off his bike and activated the vehicle's alarm system. Dick didn't mind leaving his expensive high-tech motorcycle to stand in the unsafe streets of Blüdhaven since he knew that the modified anti-theft devices graciously installed on it by Lucius Fox would make any unlucky hijacker to try to steal it regret the very day he decided to put his hands on this technological masterpiece. And if there would be some roaming hooligans to find the Wingcycle here and attempt to plainly vandalize it, its reinforced bulletproof frame would have no problem sustaining any villainous fury the local street punks could unleash on it. Therefore, Nightwing took out his Grapnel Gun and fired it at the roof of one of the nearby buildings to the left of the berthing road, leaving his 'iron horse' to wait for its rider's return.

Once on the roof, Dick was about to start making his way over the top of the buildings adjoining the City-Dock Commercial. He wanted to approach the barge from such a position that would be far beyond the field of vision of the man keeping ward of the vessel. However, at the dying second before the masked man could break into running and jumping, something else distracted him. Out of the corner of the eye, Nightwing caught a glimpse of some elusory movement on the roof of the neighboring building to the left of him. This movement felt so barely discernible and fleeting that for a moment the vigilante was ready to think that his vision was playing tricks with him. In order to make sure he wasn't hallucinating, Dick did a double take. Much to his chagrin, though, he found the neighboring roof to be completely empty. This could seem like another argument in favor of the vigilante being overly paranoid here. The only problem was that this actually wasn't the first 'alarm bell' he had heard recently.

 ** _"Ever since my visit to Blüdhaven Bank, I haven't been able to shake the feeling that I am being followed. That's weird, because the idea of somebody being capable of stalking me for so long yet still succeeding in eluding my sight through all this time doesn't seem very believable. Having been trained by one of the greatest masters of stealth in the world, I can think only of a few people whose concealment skill can match my own. But none of them should have any business being here now."_**

Nightwing remained standing on his spot for a few more moments, staring closely into the space around the nearby roof and pondering whether he should have tried to track down his mysterious pursuer – provided, of course, there was any pursuer in the first place. It wasn't long, though, before he renounced the idea, fathoming that he could not waste his time on something that might not have had any rationale behind it while there was a real matter at hand pressing for his involvement. So the dark hero disregarded his observations and headed for the City-Dock Commercial instead.

Using his acrobatic agility, the vigilante started hopping from building to building like a traceur, performing all sorts of tumbling stunts in the process. After crossing several blocks of houses like that and reaching the one confronting the City-Dock Commercial across the road, Dick took a moment to study its top surface at closer range.

 ** _"The structure has a sloping roof and cannot provide steady ground for me to land on. In order to get to the other side of the roof above the moored barge in the rear, I will have to climb my way along its ledge."_**

Faced with this option, the masked hero made a few steps back from the verge of the roof he was on. Then he took a run and leapt off the house straight toward the City-Dock Commercial building ahead. The width of the berthing road separating the dock from the house could seem pretty ample, but it was nothing a former circus acrobat couldn't handle. So Nightwing snatched at the roof right by the ledge with both his hands, letting his body hang loose from it. Then the vigilante started side-scaling his way along the roof's perimeter, trying to get close to the mooring area on the other side.

Even for someone with physical qualities like those of Dick's, climbing a ledge of a building's roof only with the help of his arms could still be an excruciating venture. Therefore, by the time the masked hero reached the end of the dock's left side, his muscles were already all aching from strain. However, he was quick to forget about the unpleasant feeling as soon as he looked at the space sprawling beneath him. The barge moored in the back area of the dock was now within his reach, and the man with a machinegun standing there still appeared to be absolutely unsuspicious of any danger lurking nearby. The only thing that remained off about this whole thing was getting on the vessel without being spotted by the sentinel earlier than needed.

 ** _"The City-Dock Commercial isn't a very tall building and jumping off its roof right on the barge will not represent a great challenge to me. The only problem is that my landing will most likely turn out very noisy and undoubtedly alert the man guarding the barge. I need to find a way to make my apparition on the barge silent and covert. And, by lucky chance, I've got something in my arsenal fitting exactly for this very purpose."_**

With a new objective in mind, the former Boy Wonder pulled himself up on the ledge of the dock's roof. Then he stood erect and pulled some tiny handle attached to the neck of his suit. This manipulation caused two bluish wing-like fabric extensions made of polyester fiber to unfold from the sides of his torso underneath his armpits. It was another upgrade the crime-fighter had introduced to his suit after having been inspired by the secret knowledge he had gained from Himalayan mystics when traveling across the world a year ago. This ingenious contraption allowed its user to slow his fall like when jumping with a parachute and even glide through the air for short distances. His former dark mentor utilized a similar system with the help of his own cape, only the effect he achieved this way was far much stronger, to the point when he could glide over half of Gotham-city as if flying on a real hang-glider. For Nightwing, however, it was a matter of principle not to add any capes or cloaks to his outfit, so he preferred to make do with how much his own adaptation afforded.

The masked hero grabbed both wings by their ends, stretching them taut, and then leapt off the roof's verge right on the vessel underneath. The outspread tissues immediately caught the wind-flow, allowing the vigilante to smoothly and quietly glide his way downwards like a kite. In less than a few seconds Dick already safely landed on the barge's surface right behind the sentinel's back without as much as making a peep. The man guarding the boat remained standing on his spot nonchalant, clearly having no foggiest idea about someone else being present on this vessel along with him. Conceiving that his arrival on the barge had really gone unnoticed, Nightwing retracted his improvised wings and carefully sneaked upon the guard from behind. Upon getting within an arm's length from him, the dark hero playfully asked the unsuspecting sentry,

"Feeling bored yet?"

The man nearly jolted out of his boots from amazement and then sharply pivoted on his feet to observe the author of the question that had so suddenly violated the stillness of the night. To his further shock, it turned out to be a tall menacing figure dressed in black and wearing a mask. Then, before the guard was even able to finish processing his dreadful discovery, the masked man just kicked the machinegun right out of his shaking hands with one mighty swing of his leg. The weapon thudded on the barge's wooden floor as the man that used to hold it fearfully staggered back apace, his eyes widening in utter terror. After spending a few seconds in abashment, he tried to lash at the vigilante standing in front of him barehanded, but his attack came out too slow and predictable for the martial arts expert his opponent was. So the vigilante effortlessly caught the fist sent into him with his left hand and then immediately retaliated by punching the guard of the barge right into his face with his other hand. Even though Dick did his best to hit the guy by only half his strength, his blow still knocked the feeble guard down to his knees. Once the sentinel was left in the toils of the dark hero, the latter twisted his enemy's arm behind his back in an arm-lock and pressed him flat to the ground, thus finally rendering the watchman subdued. The guard continued grunting and wriggling with his whole body like a snake in an attempt to get out, but without the special knowledge of submission holds and ways of escaping from them, the effort was pretty much foredoomed. As soon as he grasped that too, he tried to start a dialogue with his assailant.

"Who the fuck are you? What are you doing to me?" he demanded breathlessly, his face still pressed hard against the barge's floor.

"Sorry, no time for the introduction part, so I'll skip straight to the point," Nightwing replied without quitting hold of the man's arm, "I know that you work for Blockbuster and I know that you're here to assist his gang in taking the money stolen from Blüdhaven Bank. Just tell me where you're planning to transfer this money from here and we'll call it a night."

The subdued man bared his teeth in response, resuming to struggle to get out of the hold.

"You're nuts! I don't even know the hell you're talking about!" he muttered through further grumbles.

"Would you please cut the comedy – lowlife thugs like you aren't really good at drama," the vigilante told him sternly and, to emphasize his point, twisted the watchman's arm a bit harder, causing the latter to emit a few more painful moans. "I was told by one of your friends at the Bank that this place would be the meeting point of your dirty transaction. And now, here I find you – outside in the middle of the night, guarding an empty barge, all while holding a very dangerous toy in your hands. Coincidence, you say? Well, too bad for you, I don't believe in ones."

The guard made a couple more futile twitches with his torso before replying,

"Fucking psycho, you're not getting away with this!"

"Funny, I heard almost the exact same words from one of your gang-mates at the Bank," Dick returned lightly. "Now he's probably in handcuffs on his way to a police station, along with the rest of his cutthroat crew. Do you really believe your experience is going to be any different if you just continue making empty threats?"

Then the masked hero changed his own tone to a threatening one, at the same time tightening his grip on his interrogator's arm even harder,

"Now tell me where you're supposed to take the stolen money to, or you'll have to be taken to a hospital before you go to jail!"

The intimidated man seemed to be seconds away from giving in to pain and fear and divulging the information, when suddenly a noise rang from abaft. Alarmed by this, Nightwing curtly looked behind and saw a backdoor to the dock's warehouse starting to open. Acting on instinct, the masked crime-fighter relinquished his hold of the sentinel's arm and reached for his Wind-Ding instead. However, before he could even cock his arm for a throw, it quickly became evident to him that his modified version of a boomerang would not suffice to save the day here. As the door opened completely, more thugs started coming out of it one by one and race their way toward the verge of the berth. 'Thugs' might not have been the most accurate word, actually, as none of them was wearing any masks or other distinctive clothes that could unmistakably pertain to obdurate criminal elements. In fact, all the men coming out of the building were quite formally dressed, having full-body suits on them. Apparently, they weren't the roughnecks participating in the actual crime operations, but some higher caste appointed by Blockbuster to be responsible for more delicate part of their illegal business. Nonetheless, the presentable appearance and the possible higher status didn't prevent those people from being armed to the teeth as each one of them was carrying either a machinegun or a shotgun in his hands. This was a contingency the masked hero turned out to be completely unprepared for.

 ** _"Damn it, a cavalry?! Right here and right now?! Now that's something I could go without! Apparently, I should have scanned the dock's building with my Night Vision before ambushing this guy on the barge. But regardless of this, how did these dudes know I would be here in the first place? There's no way they could've detected me approach, so what gave me away then? Has this been a trap all along? Did that Joey guy at the Bank purposely lure me here so I would be ganged upon by the rest of the mob he works for? And even if it's so, how were they able to synchronize their assault with my arrival so well? Something about this doesn't add up."_**

As the vigilante continued analyzing the logistics of the predicament he had so suddenly found himself in, the six men to have emerged out of the dock took position on the berth in front of the barge and directed their weapons at him. Seeing so many gun muzzles pointed at him made Dick start to consider some new tactical ploys to go for.

 ** _"I'm out of my tranquilizer darts, so I can take out only two, maybe three armed thugs at one go with my other long-range weapons. But attacking six of those at once will be a plain-out suicide. Still, if I retreat now, everything I've been able to dig up on Blockbuster so far would end in a deadlock. I need to make sure that if I have to do this, it will really be the only valuable option left for me."_**

Trying not to make any violent moves while being held up at gunpoint, Nightwing slowly paced back from the body of the man he had been interrogating moments ago. He could think about no less than ten different ways to escape all the guns pointed at him now without getting as much as a scratch, but now that he saw that the men holding them weren't really hurrying to fill his body with bullets, the vigilante wanted to stay here just a bit longer to understand what their deal was. The abrupt apparition of these six thugs here could not have been an accident, as could not have been the fact that they hadn't started shooting him right away upon getting here. This whole gang was clearly up to something, and Dick wanted to understand what this something was.

Carefully assessing the situation, the vigilante took his chance of making one more step back from the barge guard that was still lying at his feet. That was when the six men keeping a bead on him finally stopped studying their wondrous target and started voicing their observations aloud.

"Hold still, freak!" one of them barked. "Hands into the air!"

"Who is this circus clown?" another one asked disparagingly.

"Is he really that very nutjob that screwed up our operation at the Bank?" someone from their group questioned as well.

That last line quickly met the vigilante's ear.

 _ **"Now that's an interesting spin – these gangsters are actually already aware that I stopped the robbery of Blüdhaven Bank. But what's their information source, I wonder? In the interval between my departure from the Bank and my arrival here, not more than half an hour could have passed. Who could possibly inform them of this within such short time period? Had someone from that gang at the Bank managed to get in touch with them before I got here? I need to find this out."**_

Intent upon getting to the bottom of this mystery, the masked hero decided to maintain the conversation with the gunmen.

"Wow, I didn't expect my prevention of the bank robbery to hit the tabloids so fast," Nightwing sneered in response to the thugs' last tirade. "Seems like news spread real quick in this town, don't they?"

"Shut up!" the first man cut him off angrily and grabbed his shotgun with renewed vigor. "Was it my call to make, freak, I would have already fed a full clip of shells to your skinny ass! But after what you've done at the Bank, our Boss wants to settle the scores with you in person. We're taking you with us!"

Dick just characteristically grinned at this statement, displaying no intimidation whatsoever.

"Oh, what an honor to meet yet another miserable overweening crime lord!" the vigilante continued clowning around. "I hope it's that Blockbuster we're talking about here, 'cause it will be a real shame if there's more than one kingpin scumbag thriving in this city."

Meanwhile, the thug that Nightwing had tried to obtain information from earlier before finally managed to return to his feet after the latter had laid him down. The humiliated watchman went to the other end of the barge to pick from the floor his machinegun which had been kicked right out of his hands by the masked crime-fighter. Then he came back to his attacker and took his revenge on the latter by hitting him with the weapon's club right to the back of his neck. The kevlar armor the vigilante was encased in absorbed most force of the blow, thus preventing Dick from getting knocked out cold. Still, that didn't make the brunt hurt any less as the dark hero dropped on his knees with a groan of pain.

"You'd better watch your fucking mouth, asshole!" Dick heard from the man that just hit him. "Just because we promised the Boss to bring you alive doesn't me we have to bring you in one piece!"

The masked hero decided not to add oil to the flames and left that comment without a reply. The rest of the gang, however, found that vulgar attempt to joke quite funny as some of them supported it with their crude form of laughter. Then one of the thugs on the berth said,

"Okay, guys, that will do. Now let's tie this son of a bitch up and put him into the trunk of the car. After the Boss is done with him, he'll wish we had just shot him dead right here."

Upon that phrase, the criminal grabbed a hasp of ropes that happened to lie right by his left foot and tossed it to his partner standing by the side of the kneeling vigilante. The thug on the barge easily caught it and began to eagerly reel out the rope, clearly dying to bind his offender hand and foot. Dick, however, remained standing on his knees without even trying to resist, having an entirely different game-plan on his mind.

 ** _"I can escape from these knuckleheads at any moment, but if I do it, I might lose my last lead to their Boss. Maybe if I just play into their hand and let them take me hostage, I'll finally be able to penetrate Blockbuster's hideout and take him down right there together with the rest of his goons."_**

This plan could seem as crazy as it was cunning, but the young vigilante was of firm belief that it was his only way of spying out the apex predator of this whole crime group. He had been chasing Blockbuster's trail for nearly a month already, and now that he could finally see his chance to grab the right end of the stick, Dick was ready to go to any lengths to do this.

However, the dark hero's self-assured ambitions were not meant to come to fruition when all out of the blue, another unexpected thing happened. Just when the thug standing near him was about to start wrapping the rope around his body, Nightwing suddenly saw something drop from above right into the midst of the group of thugs crowding on the berth. The criminals noticed that too and immediately turned their attention to the thing that had so abruptly landed at their feet with a quiet metal clang. It turned out to be a tiny round-shaped grey object the size of a ping-pong ball with two sets of cross-sections running along its frame. The six gunmen stared at it in some inert stupefaction until one of them finally vocalized his perplexity by asking,

"What the- ?"

Unfortunately for him, he never got the chance to finish that phrase as in the next instant the object exploded, giving off several intense plumes of smoke that momentarily enshrouded the whole group of thugs in one huge, thick cloud of gas. The stillness of the place instantly filled with loud coughs and swearwords as the cloud of smoke continued to grow larger and denser by the second, until the figures of the criminals caught in it completely lost to view. Their gang-mate standing by the side of Nightwing watched this spectacle with his mouth agape, obviously clueless as to what was going on. Dick, on the other hand, had already witnessed such kind of sight well over few hundreds times through the years of wearing a Robin mantle and thus was more than familiar with the thing that could cause it.

 ** _"The smokescreen these scumbags have been exposed to could only have been created by a smoke pellet – another weapon I also used to apply for quite frequently when still being a Boy Wonder. A classic military finding adapted by my former mentor for non-lethal use in his war against crime, this item can be an invaluable asset for escaping large groups of armed henchmen or creating distractions to attack your enemies when they're disoriented. In fact, this is one of the few toys from my past as Batman's sidekick that I wouldn't mind adding to my current arsenal, but haven't had the time and the necessary resources to do yet. But what I find far more curious is who am I seeing utilize this weapon right now?"_**

The question his inner voice asked made the vigilante lift his gaze at the upper part of the dock from where the pellet had supposedly been dropped on his foes. Quickly his sharp eyes registered the same shadowy shimmer of a movement there that he had seen earlier on the roof of one of the residential buildings across the road while making his way to City-Dock Commercial. The mysterious lurker descended from above into the very thick of the smoke cloud it had created, cleverly making use of every detail of the local scenery to hide behind. Shortly thereafter, the coughs and curses coming from the smokescreen got replaced with the sounds of multiple punches and kicks delivered to the ones trapped in it. Whoever it was that had been following Nightwing this whole time appeared to either have his or her own problems with these gangsters or was actually looking to aid the vigilante himself this way. The only problem was that Dick wasn't exactly a big fan of getting the help he hadn't asked for, especially if it also messed all his carefully devised scheming up.

As the mobsters on the berth continued having their asses handed to them under the cover of smoke, their partner on the barge finally decided to intervene and tried to make a move toward their havoc-wreaked crowd. With the entire landscape of the situation having changed, Dick also had to give up his initial plan of letting this gang take him hostage and switched to a new tactic instead. Therefore, before the thug that had been looking to tie him up just seconds ago could even make one step, the young vigilante briskly sweep-kicked him off his feet to prevent the latter from causing any more trouble than there'd already been so far. The man clumsily fell on the barge's floor, once again losing grip of his machinegun. He hurriedly attempted to reach for his discarded weapon then, but Nightwing was faster here and kicked the machinegun far away from his grasp. Then the crime-fighter took out one of his eskrima sticks from the holster on his calf and slugged with it the thug lying in front of him right across the face, thus cleaning his clock for good this time.

"That's for hitting me with a gun-butt, jerk!" Dick told the unconscious man.

Once through with the thug on the barge, the masked hero shifted his glance to the fight taking place on the berth. The smokescreen had already begun to dissipate gradually, but to make out any details of what was transpiring behind it was still impossible. In order to start seeing through this gas cloud, the vigilante clicked a button on the temple part of his mask and activated the Night Vision mode. The world before Dick's eyes turned digital and ultraviolet, and then, through the now transparent cloud of smoke, he descried the orange-colored thermal figures of everyone sheltered by it. The six criminals were easy to figure out, but the masked hero was much more interested in identifying the figure that was giving them a beating now. His vision mode only allowed him to see the figure's external contours, but even those happened to be quite telling. Nightwing's mysterious savior turned out to be someone wearing a cape and a mask with a pair of pointed bat-like ears. Upon discerning these features alone, the former Boy Wonder was almost about to think he was looking at his infamous dark mentor, but then he also took note of the distinctive slim, gracious feminine body type of the enigmatic stranger, as well as a bush of long, fleecy hair showing from under her cowl. The discovery of these traits brought the vigilante's shock even further as his dumbstruck mind started analyzing the astounding information he'd just obtained.

 ** _"Oh my God, somebody tell me I didn't just see that..."_**

Agitated now, Nightwing turned off his Night Vision and hastily dashed toward the smoke-covered combat zone. As much as he was glad to find out that his instincts hadn't deceived him earlier and he really had been followed at tail this time whole, the realization of who his stalker appeared to be was a much less pleasant surprise. But the vigilante needed to be sure about his suspicions, which is why he wanted to get into the thick of the action and see everything for himself, without anything to distort his view.

The smoke almost completely dissipated by the time the vigilante got on the berth. There he saw one of the six suit-wearing thugs finally emerge from the cloud of gas, still coughing hard and hectically waving one of his arms that wasn't busy holding a shotgun to drive the gusts of smoke away from his face. It seemed that this criminal had not yet entered into a fight with the mysterious combative lady to have set this ambush. Nonetheless, he still looked confused after the smoke attack she had just conducted on him and his gang-mates. However, the masked hero left the gangster no room for catching his breath and knocked him out straight away with one scathing jab to the mouth.

As one thug went down, two more became revealed to sight a couple feet farther. One was still just as dazed by the smokescreen as the first one, but the other one happened to be a bit better at withstanding such kind of ambush and was able to quickly react to the vigilante's apparition by directing his machinegun right at his enemy. Realizing that he had no opening left for a close-in assault here, Dick reflexively reached for his Wing-Ding and blisteringly cast it forth with one brisk move of his arm. Before the mobster ever got a chance to pull his weapon's kill-switch, a metal bird-shaped boomerang hit him right to the chin and sent him fall flat on his back.

The throwing weapon then returned back to Nightwing who dexterously caught it on the fly and then switched his attention to the other criminal left standing in front of him. The thug had already started to recover from the smoke bomb explosion as well and even attempted to take aim of the vigilante with his shotgun. Dick's first impulse was to hit that guy with the Wing-Ding just like he'd done with the previous one. However, seeing that this opponent represented an even weaker challenge than the one before him, the dark hero decided to use a more complicated but also a more effective method of neutralizing him. Once again demonstrating an unmatchable prowess, the former Boy Wonder dartingly took out his Grapnel Gun instead and fired it at the thug before him. The clueless mobster could only stagger at the sight of a trident metal claw on a wire-line hooking right onto his weapon with lightning-fast speed and nearly pulling the shotgun right out of his hands. Then, before the criminal could even get over his astonishment, his opponent made things worse by roughly yanking the Grapnel Gun's cable and dragging the thug toward himself right by the weapon he held. The criminal helplessly let go of his shotgun, barely refraining from falling forward by inertia. Sadly for him, the sharp tug brought the gangster right within the vigilante's attacking range, which the latter instantly availed from, slamming his right foot right into the thug's abdomen and leaving him lie on the ground in a fetal position.

Another Blockbuster's henchman was taken care of, but then it turned out that not all the thugs to have already been taken down were going to continue to stay down. With his averted vision Dick noticed the criminal he had just hit with the Wing-Ding showing some sparks of life as he tried to crawl on all fours toward his dropped machinegun. Nightwing was already about to make a move to stop that guy, but then the need for this had fallen off right before his eyes. Before the mobster's hand could even reach for his weapon, a yellow heeled boot stepped on the discarded machinegun right in front of his face and pressed it hard to the ground. Frightened, the gangster looked up and saw what appeared to him like a female version of the much acclaimed and much feared protector of Gotham-city known as Batman. The woman above him was about 5' 7'' tall and was dressed in a dark tight bodysuit with armored pads on her knees, legs and chest. On her hands she was wearing triple-spiked gauntlets that were also yellow like her boots. Along with those, the mysterious lady also sported a couple of other yellow-colored accessories which were a utility belt hanging around her wasp waist and a large bat symbol on her chest that looked similar to the one the Dark Knight carried. As for the cowl and the cape, they appeared to completely duplicate the ones the Gotham protector was so well-known for, except her cape was shorter and had a yellow inner lining, while her cowl covered only her face, leaving her long red hair exposed. Even despite the half-mask, though, it was visible that the woman's face was young and even cute. She also happened to have a very slim, pleasant womanly figure with very fine, sexy proportions. In fact, this Batman-like lady had every right to be called a real beauty, except it was hard to fixate on her attractive appearance when her furious gaze and her dark guise were striking so much fear into the heart. The effect was further intensified by the three barely conscious beaten-up bodies lying on the ground behind her back, which had clearly been left like that at her very hands.

The criminal remained staying in a crawling position nearly motionless, eyeballing the woman standing over him in some cataleptic stupor. It was until the female vigilante woke him out of it by asking him floutingly,

"What's wrong? In love yet?"

Before the thug could reply anything to this, the masked woman just swiped her leg and mercilessly kicked him right to the jaw, almost depriving the criminal of the physical capacity to reply anything to anyone ever again. Upon doing that, the female vigilante proudly rested her hands on her hips in a triumphant posture and added,

"Sorry, you're not my type anyway."

Those were confident words coming from a very confident looking person. However, that confidence was quick to wear off when the woman cast her glance at the tall, dark figure in a mask standing just a couple of feet away from her and watching her with the same petrifaction like the mobster she'd just put out. The moment her eyes met with his, the usually full-hearted and imperturbable Dick Grayson almost winced on his place out of overfilling discomfort. He had just got reassured in his worst apprehensions, and now he was forced to wrestle with the terrible recognition these apprehensions had brought with them. All this time Dick had been worrying that the mysterious person stalking him on his way here was some dangerous supervillain having a problem with him or some high-profiled assassin hired by someone to kill him. But all these reservations paled in comparison with what the truth turned out to be. The enigmatic person that had been lurking in the shadows behind his back and had just interfered with his confrontation with Blockbuster's crime syndicate was no one else but Batgirl – another one of Batman's younger allies and another protector of Gotham-city.

However, as Dick kept looking into the emerald-like eyes of this unique lady before him, he was seeing so much more than just an uncanny female crime-fighter dressed in a bat costume. Instead he was seeing her true identity securely hidden beneath the cape and the mask – the identity he was much more familiar with and the identity only few other people in the world along with him knew about. He was seeing Barbara Gordon – the daughter of GCPD's Commissioner Jim Gordon, the girl who had studied at GSU together with him, the girl he had fallen in love with and had been dating for nearly half a year, and, last but not least, the girl he had broken up with after quitting being Robin and parting ways with his former mentor and partner, Bruce Wayne.

The two young vigilantes continued standing speechless and staring at each other in some unexplainable numbness, neither one of them daring to break this silent tableau. The time and the space around them seemed to have slowed, with every second they spent glaring at each other like this feeling to be lasting an eternity. Although Dick realized that Barbara had been keeping an eye on him for quite a while already, he could still see in her eyes that she was just as bemused by this encounter as he was. It had been almost two years since the last time they stood so close to each other like this, and just like at that time, they were now beholding each other not as Dick Grayson and Barbara Gordon, but as their crime-fighting alter egos they used to try so hard to conceal from one another. The only difference was that Dick was no longer wearing the motley red-and-green leotard with a cape, but instead adopted a much darker and more dismal guise, so much like his former mentor.

Back in the days, both Barbara and Dick learned about each other's secret identities on the exact same night, but the very intricate and complicated circumstances under which it happened didn't really bring them closer together. Instead, it did quite the opposite – it became a beginning of the end for their relationship. Even despite having loved each other with all their hearts and knowing all too well what it was like to live a double life like they both did, neither of them were able to find enough understanding within themselves to put up with having been lied to for so long. The last nail in the coffin of their drama was when Dick declared his intention to leave the Wayne family and Gotham as well and offered Barbara to come with him. After much heart-searching, the girl rejected her boyfriend's offer, not willing to abandon her dearest and closest, as well as the city she was born in and dedicated her life to protecting to. But the former Boy Wonder refused to believe that it was only Barbara's personal convictions that had determined her decision. Dick remained convinced that Barbara had simply chosen to stay with Bruce – the very person that the young man had been striving so much to get out of the shadow of and the very person whose behavior and actions had caused him to take such drastic measures as leaving town in the first place. For Dick, it was much more than just a personal issue – it was a matter of his own conviction and principles. So when his own girlfriend refused to support him in perhaps the most important decision of his entire life, he saw no other option for himself than to leave not just the Wayne family, but Barbara as well.

After breaking up with Barbara and leaving Gotham, Dick had spent the next two years of his life doing his best to forget his ex-girlfriend and all the feelings he'd ever had for her. He saw this as a necessary part of cementing his new identity and personality and becoming more efficient at what he did. However, now that Dick met his former love again, he realized that two years of separation and self-persuasion might not have been enough to erase her from his heart completely as the mere sight of her face still managed to stir something within him no matter how hard he was trying to suppress that.

 ** _"Of all the people I could expect to encounter in this hellhole of a city, Barbara clearly takes the place at the very end of the list. Her emergence on my path has caught me completely off-guard, leaving me in a very uncustomary and very unpleasant state of bewilderedness. This girl is a relic of my past life as Robin which I've been trying so hard to disengage myself from these last two years. When I decided to become an independent, self-sufficient hero, I deliberately burned all the bridges connecting me to my past, which included most of the people from it as well. But seeing Barbara standing a few feet away from me like this now makes me doubt that I might not have actually got rid of all the bridges there were for me to burn. As much as I hate to admit it, Barbara was and still is the only girl I've ever truly loved in my life. This circumstance makes the task of keeping my temper with her ever harder."_**

The longer Dick kept looking into the eyes of his ex-girlfriend, the more memories and musings connected with her were running through his mind, causing him to experience some very mixed and very confusing emotions. On the one hand, he couldn't deny that a part of him was glad to see his former love after two long years of separation. But on the other hand, the part of him which was a dedicated crime-fighter was now making him hate himself for feeling so vulnerable before her, especially in full swing of him doing his job as Nightwing. He could be inches away from finding a lead in the case he was investigating, but instead he was letting his feelings distract him now. Not to mention, Barbara had just interfered with his business and ruined his plan of tracking down Blockbuster's hideout.

Eventually, the crime-fighter part of Dick's character finally won, making him forget all his earlier trepidation before his once beloved one and remember about the business at hand. Thereupon, the masked hero finally addressed himself to the female vigilante,

"What the hell are you doing here?" he asked her bluntly with undisguised discontent in his voice.

Batgirl blinked once as if coming back to herself and then refocused her gaze on Dick, a mixture of disappointment and pity creasing over her green eyes.

"Saving your sorry butt, obviously," she returned mockingly. "By the way, nice to see you too, darling."

Dick seethed his ex for her acrid remarks, but decided to stick to the point.

"I didn't ask you to save me," the dark hero objected stoutly, "I had this thing under control."

Barbara just scoffed at this, turning her glance away in display of her skeptical attitude.

"Under control? Are you freaking kidding me?" she asked Dick, barely refraining from raising her voice to shout. "Those thugs were about to take you hostage!"

"You don't understand," Nightwing went on standing his ground, "It was all a part of my plan. And you just screwed it up!"

"If your plan was to get captured by a gang of goons, then you should be glad I screwed it up!" the female vigilante snapped back.

Dick scolded his former lover for her restiveness and stubbornness. He had actually become well aware of these nasty treats of her character already back in the days when they were still dating, except he was really disappointed now to find out that those hadn't changed one bit even after two years they had spent away from each other. But this represented little news to him unlike the reason for her unexpected presence here.

"What are you doing in Blüdhaven?" he changed the subject then.

Barbara grinned at the question put to her, but again avoided giving a direct answer.

"Funny, I was actually looking to ask you the very same question," the girl responded with a mincing shrug of her shoulders.

Dick scowled at this cagy reply and said,

"You are the one to have interfered with _my_ business, do you don't get to ask questions here."

Batgirl whimsically raised one of her eyebrows at her ex-boyfriend's statement, but then disregarded it by still replying to it with another question,

"Since when did Blüdhaven become _your_ business?"

The dark hero's patience was about to become exhausted, but the desire to get to the bottom of the situation was preventing him from snapping completely.

"Why are you here?" Nightwing insistently asked the female vigilante once more as if just having ignored everything to have been said by her up until this moment.

Barbara sighed, realizing that she wouldn't be able to dodge Dick's questions forever, and finally gave a straight answer,

"Because I've been worried about you. You haven't showed up in Gotham for nearly three weeks already."

Now it was Dick's turn to arch his brow in surprise. Barbara was no longer sounding snide, appearing to be completely honest in what she had to say on this matter. However, that didn't necessarily make her explanation sound any more believable.

"Aw, how sweet is that," the dark hero reacted with venomous sarcasm, "An ex-girlfriend suddenly decided to show some concern about me after two years since she broke up with me. And you've even been keeping count of the weeks I've been gone. I'm truly moved, really."

Then Nightwing shifted to serious tone again.

"Just tell me the real reason you're here, Babs," Dick addressed himself to his ex-lover again, "Did Bruce assign you to spy on me?"

Batgirl bared her teeth, abundantly putting some extra effort into containing herself at her ex-boyfriends acidic comments as well.

"Bruce has no idea that I'm here," the girl returned steadily. "And so that you don't rewrite history, I'll remind you: YOU are the one who broke up with me, not vice versa! I loved you with all my heart and you just threw me away because of your selfish, immature, pigheaded ambitions!"

Dick felt Barbara's harsh words pierce through his inner wall of sedateness like some invisible needles. However, the young vigilante refused to give in to these intoxicating emotions.

"Am I really the one who's rewriting history here?" the young man posed a rhetorical question. "In case you forgot, before leaving Gotham, I asked you to come with me to start a new life together, and what answer did I get? I'll refresh your memory again: it was 'no', because you chose to stay with Bruce instead."

Upon hearing that, the female vigilante furiously balled her gauntleted hands into fists and made a sharp step toward her ex as if looking to punch him in the face. But at the supreme moment, the young lady restrained herself, deciding to continue talking the issue out rather than fighting it out.

"For the last time, Dick: I didn't choose to stay with Bruce!" Barbara shouted, no longer trying to control her intonation, "I merely chose to stay in my hometown where I was born, where I belong and which I swore to protect no matter what! You demanded from me that I turned my whole life upside down in one solitary moment; that I abandoned my father, my friends, my study, my job - only because YOU were facing some personal crisis at that moment! I wasn't ready for such drastic change, while you just couldn't stop putting more and more pressure on me! That's why I refused to come with you!"

Such burst of rebukes nearly swept Dick off his feet. Even though he and Barbara had already had a heart-to-heart talk on this topic two years ago, discussing this problem now was making Dick see it at a different angle. For two years the young man had lived with unflinching belief in the righteousness of his cause, but now that he was looking into the eyes of the only girl he'd ever truly loved, he was no longer so certain about it. But one thing he was truly adamant of was that he couldn't allow his doubts to get the better of him now. He was now a different person, and old mistakes had to be left in the past.

"Whatever," Nightwing indifferently brushed the girl's ranting aside. "So, have you been following me all along just to tell me this?"

Barbara stopped fuming for a moment and unclenched her fists. Then she made one step back from Dick and turned his back to him. However, it was visible that this was not because she was looking to walk away from this conversation, but because she simply had problems continuing to look him in the eyes now.

"I wouldn't put myself to so much bother just for the sake of raking up the past which cannot even be fixed anymore," she replied solemnly. "In fact, talking to you know makes me seriously question my decision to come here in the first place. But despite this, and even despite you with all your unbearable brazenness and callousness, I can't help but admit that I still care about you."

Dick could feel how some very fragile and very delicate chord had just been struck somewhere deep within him. That was the very same sensation he would often experience when he and Barbara were still together. Even with so much water to have flowed under the bridge since that time, this girl continued to be a big part of who he used to be and who he had become. Maybe there really was no complete erasing her from his heart for him.

"Well, thanks, I guess," Dick said uncertainly, no longer emanating with his former assurance, "But I can take care of myself just fine. I am no longer the scanty, short teenage sidekick of the great Dark Night. I don't need you or anybody else to babysit me."

The young lady waved her arms in a gesture of dismay and turned to her interlocutor again.

"Goddamn it, Dick, this isn't about babysitting you!" Barbara exploded again. "This is about you going way too far in your desire to position yourself as an independent hero!"

"What do you mean by that?" the dark hero asked her with genuine failure to grasp her point at first.

Barbara sighed again and then proceeded with explicating her idea.

"Listen, Dick, I can understand and even to some extent relate to your decision to distance yourself from Bruce and his sometimes intrusive supervision," she said, "But meddling in the affairs of hellholes like Blüdhaven is just too much. Don't you understand that you're simply out of your depth here?"

Nightwing tilted his head to the side in puzzlement, his whole face frowning.

"Hold on a second," he said, retrieving some of his former confrontational attitude, "Are you telling me that you don't think I can handle a city like Blüdhaven? For the record, I began training to do this kind of stuff while you were still enjoying a placid childhood of an ordinary little girl playing Barbie dolls."

"For the record, I've never played Barbie dolls," Batgirl retorted. "And I don't mean to question your skills, your abilities or your perseverance. But stepping upon an alien turf like this and trying to enforce your own order on it is just way too dangerous."

Dick turned his glance away, shaking his head with irritation.

"Seriously? You gonna lecture me about dangerousness?" he boiled over. "You, a daughter of a police commissioner and a former teenage schoolgirl who just at some point decided she wanted to be a hero like her favorite Batman and then put on a hand-made costume to start sneaking out at nights and pick up fight with street thugs without having any training or even back-up?"

The corners of Barbara's lips distorted into another grimace of overfilling exacerbation.

"First of all, I did have training," the girl continued to talk back. "Secondly, this is a completely different matter! I was born and raised in Gotham, I've spent my whole life in it, I've known every alleyway there and I've always been perfectly aware of all the dangers its streets posed. You don't know the first thing about Blüdhaven. You have no idea what kind of horrors can be creeping in the depths of this hellish city."

Dick crossed his arms before his chest, his pose demonstrating his disagreement with Barbara's arguments.

"Why would a factor of unfamiliarity pose any problem to me?" the dark hero asked his ex. "Even when I was still Bruce's sidekick, our crime-fighting activity was also not limited only by the borders of Gotham city. And when I was a leader of Teen Titans, a couple of times I had to cross not just Gotham's, but this entire planet's boundaries for the justice to be served and the innocent people to be protected."

"Which still didn't make either of this any less dangerous ventures," the female vigilante went on arguing."Just think about this: you've spent almost ten years protecting Gotham alongside Bruce, and even after so much time, it still continues to be a very dangerous place to deal with even for the three of us at the same time. Now, from what I've heard, Blüdhaven is a far worse case on every level. So, of all other towns in the world, why would you want to make exactly this pandemonium your sole responsibility?"

The young man turned his gaze away again for an instant, drawing a deep breath though his nose, then replied,

"I have no intention of making Blüdhaven my responsibility," Nightwing declared. "I didn't even plan to come to this city at first. I've just been following the trail of a killing spree that originated in Gotham, which eventually brought me to this town. But when I discovered how bad this city is suffering from the crime rampaging here and all the outlaw scum controlling it, I realized I cannot just stand apart and mind my own business. Now I've also discovered that the person responsible for those crimes committed in Gotham also happens to be the crime lord holding this whole city in his dirty palm. And if I take him down, I'll do a great big favor not just to Blüdhaven, but to all the neighboring towns as well."

After this tirade, Barbara went silent for a couple of seconds, seeming to have no counterargument left for Dick's stance on this. However, even if she could agree with her ex-boyfriend on a logical level didn't necessarily mean that she also had to agree with him on a personal level.

"But what about Gotham?" the girl asked, clinging onto the last thing that could possibly make Dick change his mind. "It needs your protection too!"

"Gotham already has more than enough people to protect it while I'm not around," the masked hero momentarily blurted out as if already prepared for this kind of argument. "Besides, rumor has it that Bruce has already found another Boy Wonder to fill up my vacancy."

The last part of Dick's statement made Batgirl roll her eyes discontentedly.

"Oh Jesus, please don't tell me you stirred up this whole mess with Blüdhaven just because you're being jealous," the young lady lamented.

The dark hero only scoffed at this.

"Jealous?! Of who or what?" he taunted. "If anything, I feel sorry for this kid. He's going to get entangled into the very same circle of rage and hate like you and I did, only to be used by Bruce as another instrument of his own vendetta against the entire world's crime."

This line seemed to have been the last straw preventing Barbara from losing her temper as she starkly approached her former lover within just a few inches of personal space remaining between them,

"I can't believe you're still being such a jerk to him even after so many years!" she unloaded on Dick and even gruffly dabbed him with her index finger right into his chest. "He might have been strict, hard-boiled and everything, but he always loved you like his own son! He still does!"

Dick kept having his weak spots mercilessly assaulted by his ex-girlfriend. He detested her for using those cheap shots on him, but much more that that he detested himself for being vulnerable to them in the first place. He might have had tons of anger and grudge harbored within him against his former mentor now, but there was no denying that for a very long period of his life, that man used to be someone he'd been admiring and idolizing with all his heart. At some point, the young Dick Grayson really started to wish that Bruce Wayne became not just his legal ward but his real father too. But eventually, the former realized that that dream would never turn into reality. Bruce might have been his preceptor, partner and supporter, but he had never been his father. Not only he didn't know how to be a father – he had never even displayed an ounce of willingness to learn how to be one to Dick. This perception became one of the main factors that had laid the foundation of Richard's disappointment with his mentor, which only continued to grow over the years. And now, to hear from someone that Bruce had actually been having some fatherly love for him all along which Dick had supposedly just failed to recognize felt to be disintegrating the very fundament of the young man's life stance he'd developed by this moment. But the stubborn vigilante refused to believe in the fallacy of his views and beliefs and preferred to hold onto his stiff non-admission of anything that went against his current stand.

"I don't know what exactly made you think this way, but soon you'll too understand that this man doesn't love anybody," Nightwing continued exchanging words with Batgirl. "He only loves beating up criminals to bloody pulp, and the fact that he continues to recruit teenagers into his crusade only proves this point. Even after what happened with me, Bruce still hasn't made any inferences. He doesn't care about the lives he ruins by enmeshing them in his never-ending war against crime. He only cares about his own selfish desire for vengeance, regardless of the price at which it might come!"

Barbara continued to speechlessly regard her former lover for a few more moments with a whole multitude of mixed negative emotions reflecting in her emerald eyes. Then she made a couple of steps back from him and declared in a deflating voice,

"You're still just as bitter as you ever were. With or without a new costume and a new identity, you're still the same morally damaged, unforgiving little orphan boy. I guess the old saying goes just right, after all: the more things change, the more they stay the same."

The dark hero found himself really offended by Barbara's caustic remarks, but decided to abstain from debating the issue any further.

"I guess it does," he responded dryly and just walked past the female vigilante to the left side of the berth.

Batgirl followed him with her somber gaze, never ceasing to be further blanched by the kind of person her once beloved had become.

"So it seems I'm wasting my time here trying to dissuade you out of making another mistake of your life," she alleged after another moment of loss for words.

Dick didn't even bother looking back at her to reply, still continuing to march his way along the berth.

"Not sure about _your_ time, but you're clearly wasting mine," he said gruffly. "Now that you just screwed up my entire plan, I will have to obtain the information I need by interrogating one of these guys lying unconscious here, and I need to do this fast before something else happens and spoils my game. And your intrusive presence isn't really helping, Babs."

The girl in a bat suit barely had enough anger left in her to continue being resentful at her ex for his scurvy words. So she just disregarded his last comment and finally prepared to leave the scene.

"Fine," Barbara resigned herself at last, "You're a big boy already, so have it your way then. Just mark my words that sooner or later you _are_ going to get yourself killed here. And when you find yourself within an inch of your life, none of us will be around to help you."

"That's okay – it won't be the first time," Nightwing quipped, his back still turned to the young lady.

Bargirl scowled again and just turned away without a reply, already looking for a convenient vantage point to grapple onto and make her walkout. In the meantime, Dick leaned over the body of the thug he'd knocked out right upon getting on the berth to start examining him now. The guy was still in la-la land after the blow the vigilante had delivered to him, but it was nothing a few slaps to the face couldn't correct. However, before the dark hero could even start bringing the criminal to his senses, the air got diluted by the sound of police sirens beginning to ring in the distance. Moreover, the sound wasn't coming from somewhere afar, but in fact felt very close to this area as if whatever transport carrying it was already coming close to the City-Dock Commercial. This made Dick abstract himself from the flabby husk lying underneath him for an instant and bristle. Barbara, who also had not yet left by this time, noticed it too and even took her time to launch her Grapnel Gun. For a few seconds, both vigilantes just listened to the sound of the impending siren as if making sure they weren't mistaken in their estimation of its proximity. Then their suspicions got proven true when the dark space of the nearby street got illumed by the bright flashing red and blue lights. There were several SWAT cars arriving in front of the other side of the docks, all driving at great speeds as if coming here in response to a signal. They didn't look like some guard patrols that just happened to be close by – it was almost as if somebody had deliberately called them to this place.

"Oh shit, not now!" Nightwing cursed aloud with disdain from another unexpected obstacle to have got in his path.

 ** _"First those thugs in suits that ambushed me, then Barbara with her self-invited attempt to save me, and now this. It's almost as if someone's purposely throwing all these complications in my way to prevent me from getting my hands on Blockbuster. But while I can wrap my head around the first two hindrances more or less, what I completely fail to understand is how in the hell the police have arrived exactly at this very location exactly at the very moment when I'm about to obtain information from Blockbuster's henchmen. It's not that our fight here was so loud it could attract somebody's attention and make this somebody call the cops. And the police squad that was summoned to Blüdhaven Bank after I'd left couldn't have cross-examined the robbers so fast to already know about this place being the meeting point of their gang. There's obviously some dirty game being at work here."_**

The young crime-fighter could already hear the voices of the SWAT officers stepping out of their cars and heading for the rear area of the docks. Dick realized he was caught in a dilemma now: if he stayed, the police would try to take him in just like these criminals, but if he left right now, the location of Blockbuster's hideout would remain undiscovered to him, and all the efforts he'd put into tracking the nasty kingpin down would be in vain. Befuddled by this, Nightwing hurriedly shook the gangster underneath him out of his slumber, and, as soon the latter barely opened his eyelids, the vigilante instantly started interrogating him.

"Your Boss – where's he hiding?" the young man asked so hastily that his voice almost resembled a bestial snarl. "Answer me now unless you wanna spend the rest of your life riding a wheelchair!"

"Like hell I'm gonna tell you," the barely conscious thug croaked in return, not intimidated by the dark hero's threats in the slightest. "The police will be here any moment, so you're not getting jack shit from me!"

Dick coarsely grabbed the criminal by the lapels of his suit and lifted him slightly from the ground.

"I can still break enough bones in your body to leave you paraplegic before the police are here!" the former Boy Wonder went on menacing his examinant.

The mobster only laughed at that hoarsely.

"You're a dumb-fucked freak," he mocked the masked hero. "You have no idea who my Boss is! There's nothing you can possibly threaten me with!"

The enraged Nightwing was already about to start fulfilling his promise to cripple the thug, but then Barbara's voice came from the rear and intercepted him.

"Dick, the police are almost here! There's no time for this now!" the girl shouted after him.

The dark hero wanted to disregard his ex-girlfriend's concerns yet again, but then a bright glow coming from afore made him change his mind. Dick shifted his glance and saw several blinding beams of white advancing on him from the darkness ahead. Those were made by the tactical lights on the SWAT officers' firearms as they were using them to illume their night-covered path leading to the berth. This sight finally succeeded in making the stubborn young man listen to the voice of reason, which this time happened to speak to him through the words of his former lover. However, just because he had to leave now didn't mean he also had to leave the final word rest with the impudent mobster he'd tried to interrogate. With that, he violently slammed his fist right into the gangster's face, turning his lights off again. Thereupon, Nightwing got off the knocked-out criminal and balefully told his senseless body,

"Then have a nice rotting in your prison cell, scum."

After this phrase, the dark hero took out his Grapnel Gun and fired it at the distant corner of the City-Dock Commercial's roof. Seeing that he finally made the right choice, Batgirl was also quick to follow his example by shooting another cable-line with a similar gadget wrist-mounted into the gauntlet on her hand. By the time the SWAT got on the berth, the two vigilantes already disappeared in the darkness of the night, leaving only the broken unconscious bodies of the thugs they'd battled together for the hapless police officers to find.


	3. Chapter 3: Consequential Losses

**Author's note:** _At last, the complete Chapter 3 is finally up. I apologize for this colossal delay in updates - I just got a new job several months ago which requires me to do a lot of foreign traveling now, thus not leaving me much time for writing fics. However, lately I've finally started getting the hang of this whole 'living life in a fast lane' thing and, as a first step, I've finalized the third installment of 'Nightwing Extreme'. I really hope you're going to like the continuation of the plot-line that was left off at the end of Chapter 2._

 _Thanks to everyone who still continues to read and follow this story and wait for new chapters! And as always, I still urge everyone to be more active with reviewing and always try to provide feedback whenever possible._

 _Thank you for your attention and now, onward with 'Nightwing Extreme',_

* * *

 **Chapter 3: Consequential Losses**

 _ **Gotham City – 2 years ago**_

Later in the evening, after the official part of the graduation ceremony at Gotham State University was over, the long-awaited celebration part was finally kicked off. The party for the graduates was being held within the walls of the famous expensive and bombastic Biltworth Hotel in Gotham, which for many years had been generously providing its rich premises to GSU for the festive occasions hosted by the University at the end of each studying year. This year was no exception as well, so once again the entire grand ballroom of the hotel was reserved only for the GSU graduates for the rest of the night. Inside, waiters dressed to the nines were ceremoniously serving regale champagne and snacks all over the place with a pleasant sounding orchestra playing jazz on stage, all while the fresh school leavers were greatly enjoying themselves in this very uplifting and inspirational atmosphere. Graduation from college was a great milestone in the life of every young person – it was a unique threshold separating the life of a youngster from the life of an adult. Tomorrow all those boys and girls were going to wake up as grown-ups, with their future lying in plain-out view before them and all its new opportunities, ways and perspectives resting nowhere else but in their own two hands. Therefore, the celebration of such a one-of-a-lifetime moment had to be made all the more memorable.

In the midst of this exuberant banquette, a few couples were dancing a slow dance near the stage where the jazz band was performing. One of those couples was Dick Grayson and Barbara Gordon, finally reunited with each other after the long hours of the official graduation ceremony. Barbara was still in her black evening dress, looking as stunning as ever, her hands resting on Dick's broad, firm shoulders. Dick was finally free of the awkward, nerdy looking black gown with the mortarboard and was now dressed in a showy white tuxedo with a black bowtie, as well as dark suit pants and varnished shoes. This ensemble was of excellent fit for him, perfectly accentuating his tall figure and well-built body-type. He was holding Barbara by her slim, supple waist, feeling the warmth of her skin even through the tissue of her dress. Dick had to admit he was surprised how even after six months of dating this girl and having already been intimate with her more than just a few times, the mere touch to her body or the mere look into her emerald eyes could still cause so much flutter in his heart. This was basically the first serious relationship he'd ever had in his life, and a lot of emotional discoveries he kept making during it were still very new to him. All the romantic affairs he'd had before were mostly based just on some fleeting flashes of passion and thus ended no sooner than that passion was gone. But with Barbara, it was a completely different thing. Dick could hardly believe it himself, but it was almost as if with every next day spent together with this incredible young lady, he always kept finding something new about her to make him fall in love with her over and over again. Apparently, that was what true love was all about: an endless number of new reasons to be attracted to your special someone like for the very first time in your life.

The two lovers continued slowly whirling in a dance, relishing every second spent with each other like this. That night they were probably the most beautiful couple on the dance floor, if not in the entire ballroom hall, which certainly earned them plenty of envious gazes from some of their fellow students and graduates hanging around. A lot of guys would have loved to be in Dick Grayson's place right now, the same way as many girls wouldn't have minded to be the ones to hold him in their embrace like Barbara Gordon was doing at the moment. But Barbara and Dick didn't care about what others around could be thinking or saying now. They were living in the moment and enjoying every single bit of it, simply happy to have one another to spend a night like this together.

At some point, Barbara finally decided to break the magical quietness of reveling in the arms of her dancing partner by starting a conversation with him.

"So, Mr. Grayson," she referred to Dick after a long period of just silently staring into his deep blue eyes and nearly melting in them, "Now that you're out of school, what are you going to do with your life? Are you planning on becoming a fancy in-house lawyer supporting billion dollar M&A transactions?"

Dick who hadn't stopped smiling ever since the party began grinned even wider at his girlfriend's question.

"Don't think so," the young man answered disingenuously. "Becoming an office monkey isn't exactly my kind of thing – don't wanna spend the rest of my life sitting in an office chair in front of a computer screen all while drowning in stacks of useless corporate papers."

Barbara chuckled at this facetious reply and slightly tightened her grip on Dick's neck.

"So what's it gonna be, then? An attorney? An advocate?" she put another round of questions to the handsome brunette.

"Well, being a litigation lawyer would probably work better for me," Dick surmised aloud. "However, it's not like anybody will let me become a full-fledged attorney right away. I've only just graduated - I still need to gain some professional experience, some legal practice before I can be a true lawyer. I will probably have to undertake an internship with some legal firm or with a court first. And it will be a big stroke of luck if this internship happens to be a paid one."

Barbara just smiled at her boyfriend's statement as if not taking his concerns too seriously.

"Well I'm sure that a person living under the same roof with the famous Gotham billionaire Bruce Wayne would have no such problem as getting noticed by a reputable and prominent employer," the girl remarked coquettishly.

Dick knitted his eyebrows together in an expression of discontent with her comment, but retained lighthearted demeanor nonetheless.

"No no no, I'm done sponging off Bruce Wayne," the young man hurried to dissuade the girl out of her delusional assumptions. "I'm 21 years old already, I'm ready to be my own man now. Whatever I decide to do next, I'm not gonna use his influence, his connections or his money to back me up."

Barbara sheepishly dropped her eyes for a moment, only now realizing that her last line might have been taken by Dick the wrong way.

"Relax, darling," she quickly fawned over her lover and leaned a bit closer to him, "I know better than anyone else that you don't need Mr. Wayne or anyone else for that matter to help you achieve your goals. But you said yourself than this internship might not necessarily be subject to a fee. I hope that just because you're ready to be your own man now doesn't mean you're planning to live in extreme poverty during your establishment period."

This time it was Dick's turn to chuckle as he already had a response prepared for that.

"Of course not," he said confidently. "Now that I'm of the full legal age, I've gained access to the trust fund set up for me by Haly's circus when I was still a child. It contains a sizable insurance settlement the circus received from my parents' death. Certainly it's no match for Bruce's billions, but it will definitely be enough to provide me with self-sufficiency until I finally get my feet on the ground."

Barbara smiled again at that, but then suddenly shifted her glance somewhere to the side as if having something on her mind. Dick couldn't help but notice that too and quickly asked her,

"What is it, Babs?"

The young lady winked her green eyes back to her lover, her face now looking more serious.

"Oh nothing," she tried to set her boyfriend at ease, although still sounding dire. "It's just... you know, lately, I haven't been able to get rid of the impression that aside from striving to become independent from Mr. Wayne, you've also been striving to literally distance yourself from him."

Upon hearing that statement, Dick felt something lurch inside him. Barbara somehow managed to hit the bull's eye with that remark of hers, although the young man was at a loss what could have given that away to her as he was certain he had been doing his best to make sure nobody suspected that he and his mentor hadn't been quite on the same page recently. Apparently, after almost half a year of being together, Barbara could now read him like an open book. That girl was, indeed, as smart and perceptive as she was beautiful, which also made a big part of the reason why Dick was attracted to her so much.

"I... wouldn't put it like this," Dick awkwardly skirted his girlfriend's comment. "Don't get me wrong – just because I want to start a new life doesn't mean I've stopped being grateful to Bruce for everything he's done to me over the years. He got me out of orphanage, gave me a roof over my head, taught almost everything I know, made sure I never wanted for anything... Hell, he even helped me get over my grief from the loss of my parents. But now that I'm a grown man, I don't wanna stay in his shadow anymore. I want people to start seeing _me_ and not the person they visualize standing behind my back the moment they learn that I'm Bruce Wayne's former legal ward."

Barbara nodded in display of her agreement with that thesis, but didn't smile this time.

"Well, I can certainly understand the desire to get out of somebody's shadow," she said in a knowing tone. "I too have spent a fair amount of time wearing an invisible 'Daughter of the GCPD Commissioner' badge on my forehead. But there's something else that I don't understand. When you and I just began to date, the way you spoke of Mr. Wayne and the things you told me about him made it seem like you're treating him not just as your legal guardian, but as your real father. But now that I listen to you six months later and try to correlate what you say now with what I've also been noticing as of late, I don't get this impression anymore. Instead, I get the impression that the two of you have completely alienated from one another, and the only thing that still keeps you together is just the manor you both live in."

Dick was starting to feel slightly uncomfortable as his girlfriend continued persistently digging her way to the bottom of this hard topic. It wasn't that he didn't wish to discuss it at all or wasn't ready for this discussion yet, but more like he hadn't figured out himself what his own stance on that issue was. The young man certainly realized that he had started becoming detached from his mentor on a whole number of levels lately, but he hadn't been making a big deal out of it. He was just going with the flow, feeling like his growing desire for more independence and less supervision on the part of Bruce was just a natural stage of his character development process. However, now that the love of his life made him ponder this issue a bit deeper, Dick began to doubt whether this whole situation was slightly more serious and complex than he had allowed himself to believe.

"I guess I can see where you're coming from with that observation," Dick finally agreed with Barbara. "You're right: for a very long time I've really been thinking of this man as my own father. I mean, Bruce is a great guy on almost every count possible - you just can't help but respect and admire his tremendous character and personality. So when you're a scared little orphan boy that happens to be adopted by him as his legal ward, I guess it just inevitably gets to a point when you start willing to call this man your dad."

Then Dick turned his gaze sideways for a moment and frowned as if arriving at some very unpleasant thought.

"However, at some time I realized that Bruce is also a very... complicated man," he proceeded, carefully picking his words. "I mean, he has every right to be one – he went through one of the most shocking horrors in life one could possibly imagine: watching both his parents getting murdered right in front of him while being just an 8-year old boy. I damn sure know what it's like to be exposed to this kind of hell, and I can safely say such things change you forever..."

On this note, Dick's eyes went solemn, and so did his voice. Barbara immediately noticed that shift in her boyfriend's demeanor and hurried to caress his sad face with her hand in a comforting gesture of compassion.

"Nonetheless, even despite having suffered the nearly same tragedy myself, I see now that its impact on me wasn't just as strong as the one Bruce's despair had had on him," the young man went on, now sounding less solemn and more earnest. "Of course, it also took me a long while to recover after that horrible event, and even today I still have nightmares about it that make me wake up in the middle of the night in cold sweat. But regardless of this, someway somehow the death of my parents didn't affect my optimistic outlook on life and my faith in humanity. Call me naïve if you want, but I still believe there are plenty of good people out there – you just shouldn't let those few among them that are bad cloud your sight."

Barbara wreathed in an affectionate smile at that tirade of Dick's.

"Aww darling, there's nothing naïve about being the compassionate and kindhearted person that you are," she told him lovingly. "On the contrary, it takes a lot of inner strength and character maturity to retain such qualities after what you've been through. This is one of the main reasons why I love you so much."

Dick smiled in return, deeply moved by his girlfriend's cordial words.

"Thanks, Babs," he replied, then added in a teasing tone, "Although, quite frankly, I've always thought it was my good looks that made you get a crush on me in the first place."

Barbara heartily laughed at her lover's joke, as always delighted by his sense of humor.

"Well, can't take that away from you, too," she played along with his jest.

"Thanks again," said Dick. "But, jokes aside, I'm really glad that that tragedy didn't completely strip me of my ability to see the good in this life."

Then his glance faltered again and he added,

"But, unfortunately, I'm afraid I can't say the same about Bruce."

"Why not?" Barbara asked.

The former circus acrobat sighed, again making an effort to find the right words.

"Honestly – I don't know," he answered. "But I've always had a feeling that unlike me Bruce never really got over his tragedy. Even after almost thirty years, it still looks like he cannot let go of that painful memory as if still running it through his mind over and over again and analyzing whether he could have done something that night to prevent that horror from happening. I think he's still blaming himself for what transpired back then, and this burden of guilt continues to show through in his every word and action. The death of his parents rendered him a very dark, enclosed, distrustful person – the qualities he cannot drop even with those few dearest and closest that he has in his life. Because of that, even despite living together with him for almost ten years, most of this time I've still been feeling... lonely. So, at some point, I just fathomed that no matter how much I wanted to see him as my father, he'd still never start seeing me as his son."

This time it was Barbara's facial expression that saddened. However, that didn't prevent her from continuing to put more questions to Dick.

"But haven't you ever tried to reach out to him? Like, breach this whole inner wall of detachment of his as someone close to him?" she asked her boyfriend then.

Dick chuckled, but this once rather sarcastically than humorously.

"More than a few hundred times by my count," he quipped flatly. "But like I already said, Bruce isn't exactly the kind of guy that enjoys having heart-to-heart talks or opening up to people, be those his close ones or not. You can ask Alfred – the man has been with him almost since the day of his birth, and even _he_ cannot brag about knowing Bruce well enough to understand what's going on inside his head."

After that response, Barbara went silent for an instant, appearing to be giving a thorough thought to what her boyfriend had revealed to her. It wasn't too long, though, before she came up with more thoughts of her own on this matter.

"It's really upsetting to realize that some people like Mr. Wayne can never fully heal from their emotional traumas," she commented then. "But didn't you ever think that maybe he's trying to fill in those emotional gaps in his heart with people like you?"

Dick quizzically raised his eyebrow at the girl's strange choice of words.

"Um... I'm not sure if I understand what you mean by that," he said half-jokingly.

The daughter of the GCPD Commissioner smiled awkwardly, comprehending that there might have been a better way for her to frame her idea.

"What I'm trying to say is," Barbara took the word again, "maybe Mr. Wayne really has spent too much time on the wrong track to just up and change now. But what if he's trying to use those few close people in his life like you and Alfred to complete him in ways he knows he cannot complete himself on his own? What if he needs to have someone like you by his side because that's the only way for him to be a better person?"

The seemingly weird thought that Barbara had problems expressing at first turned out to have quite some profound meaning behind it, which made Dick get buried in some serious musings. Once again, his girlfriend made him arrive at an idea that he appeared to have always had a firm understanding of, but had never really pondered much before. Barbara, indeed, had quite a talent for grasping the very essence of things without even knowing their background story sometimes. This young lady definitely had some very highly advanced logical thinking and analytical skills for a person of her age. Of all the people to have ever entered GSU's Faculty of Law with the intention of one day becoming great, successful lawyers, Barbara Gordon was probably one of the most naturally endowed persons for this kind of purport.

"I've... never thought of it this way," Dick admitted. "You made a really interesting point, but I'm afraid I still don't get what you're trying to drive at with it."

"I'm driving at the possibility of your decision to distance yourself from Mr. Wayne being a bit rushed," Barbara returned quickly. "You see, I totally believe that he really is a complicated man, and I most certainly trust you when you say that living with him all these years might not have been the most home-felt experience. But the way I see it from your explanation, you seem to be thinking that Mr. Wayne doesn't need anyone whatsoever, including you. But I think it's a big overstatement. If fact, I think he needs you much more that you've ever let yourself believe, even though he might not have been very good at displaying that. Perhaps, he needs you even more than just a father can need a son."

The former member of 'the Flying Graysons' circus act continued having his conscious expanded to the limits he did not know he had. Dick was amazed how close his girlfriend was getting to the absolute truth in her assessment of the relationship between himself and Bruce. She was almost like some kind of oracle, capable of seeing things she couldn't possibly have any knowledge of but was somehow able to feel on some deeper, almost visceral level. Dick really wished he could have told Barbara everything about himself and Bruce as it was, without holding any details back or talking round the corners. But revealing to her a secret about her boyfriend being no one else but Batman's vigilante sidekick known as Robin whose activity was the antithesis of nearly everything both Dick and Barbara had been taught at the University was not something that could just be done off-hand. Dick had already considered the idea of telling Barbara the whole truth about himself more than a few dozen times, but whenever he did so, either the time wasn't right, or the place, or his own mindset. Deep down inside the young man realized that the time and the place for doing this would never be ideal, and the only thing to determine this groundbreaking moment was simply him finding enough courage within himself to disclose his dark secret to his beloved one. Nonetheless, at that instant, Dick remained of firm belief that the time for making that serious step had simply not come yet.

"You may be right about that," Dick agreed with the girl's last statement. "But then again, I'm not looking to literally distance myself from Bruce. I'm merely looking to establish myself as a self-sufficient, grown-up man. I have been willing to do this for a very long time already, but I've been too dependent on him. Now I finally got almost everything I need to be completely freestanding: the age, the experience, the education, even the money. It's natural for every fledgling bird to leave its nest at some point in order to be able to learn to fly and to survive in the severe conditions of wildlife. The same goes for people. I'm glad if Bruce really needs me as much as you think he does, but he has to understand that I can't possibly be around him forever. If he's truly been drawing some influence from me through all these years, then he should also know how to retain everything he'd been able to gain from me so far and continue keeping with it even when I cannot be by his side."

This confident assertion appeared to be the very last word in this debate. The realization of this made Barbara cast her gaze down in display of her unspoken acceptance of her boyfriend's unflinching standpoint. Of course, she didn't completely agree with him on every level, but she respected his opinion and confided in his decisions. Barbara was a very wise young lady and already understood that a big part of having a good relationship was supporting your partner in his or her every major endeavor. The boundless love and appreciation couldn't always be enough – sometimes, you also had to demonstrate respect for your significant other's views and choices. And Dick was the kind of person that deserved that respect.

"Well, I guess you probably know better what you're doing," Barbara gave in at last. "Anyway, whatever choice you're gonna make, I'll be there for you no matter what. I just hope that when you finally grab one of those stars that you're so eager to reach for now, you're not just gonna cut loose everyone who got left far beneath."

Dick laughed in response, amused by both the girl's advice and by the fact that she had concurred with his stance at last.

"By no means," he cheerfully hurried to dispel his girlfriend's concerns. "If and when I ever get to reach any of those stars you're talking about, I'm planning to take everyone who helped me soar up that high together with me."

Then the young man leaned his head closer to Barbara's pretty face and added with a playful undertone to his voice,

"And I really hope you're going to be the first person in line for this space trip."

Barbara blushed slightly and gave her boyfriend a frisky look.

"Now that's where we both think alike," she summed up coyly and then threw her arms around Dick's neck with renewed vigor, looking to pull the handsome guy into a deep kiss.

The young man eagerly allowed his lover to clasp him in a tight embrace, his face starting to drift closer and closer to Barbara's in anticipation of the precious moment of a passionate kiss. However, when his lips were nearly an inch away from touching hers, the fresh graduate suddenly sensed an unpleasant buzzing vibration beginning to come from his suit's inside pocket. This forced Dick to intercept the promising prelude and briskly stop a second before kissing Barbara. The girl had to stop as well, glimpsing at her boyfriend with a mixture of surprise and disappointment in her eyes. Dick could only make an awkward face and then reluctantly reached for his inside pocket to take a ringing cell phone out of it. However, that cell phone was no ordinary one. Although looking like any common smart phone, it was actually set to a very special encrypted frequency that could not be tracked down or hacked onto by anyone who wasn't its authorized user. And Dick knew only two other people aside from him who had access to it: Alfred and Bruce. Therefore, whenever he received a call on that phone, he knew it had to do with his crime-fighting activity.

"Excuse me, I have to take this," he told Barbara and, without even waiting for her reaction, hastily made his way toward the distant corner of the ballroom, looking to find a place where no one could eavesdrop on his upcoming conversation.

The daughter of the GCPD Commissioner was left standing alone in the middle of the dance floor, watching her lover walk away with a bemused and suspicious gaze on her face. It sure wasn't the first time when she and Dick were in the middle of something, and then he would get curtly pulled out by a sudden phone call like this. However, she never could expect that the same could happen on a night like this. Anyway, she decided to stay optimistic and hope that this phone call would not necessarily result in Dick standing her up amidst his own graduation party. Therefore, the girl decided to go to the buffet table to get some punch while her boyfriend was having whatever conversation was so urgent to him.

Meanwhile, Dick found some non-crowded part of the place near the staff area room in the depth of the floor where he could finally answer the call. He already had some assumptions about who could be disturbing him in full swing of his graduation night. With Alfred being too polite and too well-conducted to bother him at a moment like this even if there was any emergency, the only remaining candidate for the role was pretty much obvious. Therefore, by the time Dick pushed the 'Accept the call' button on the display of his phone, he already knew who he was going to hear.

" _I've got a lead on the Joker's thugs at Goth Space,"_ a stern, deep masculine voice that could only belong to his mentor, the Dark Knight, boomed on the other end of the phone line, _"Meet me there."_

Upon hearing that, Dick had to draw a deep breath to refrain himself from replying to his interlocutor with the use of some unquotable expressions. Bruce definitely had quite some talent for picking the most inconvenient moments for summoning his sidekick to crime-fighting missions, but this once the Gotham protector seemed to have beaten his own record. Not only hadn't he even taken pain to show up at Dick's graduation – he even had no scruples about calling him on a mission after that right in the middle of the perhaps one of the most important events in the young man's entire life as if it was of no importance whatsoever. Dick could come up with no less than ten different reasons why this wasn't a very nice thing for Bruce to do, but he preferred to keep them all to himself. Years of living under the same roof with this man had taught the former circus acrobat that arguing with the former could be as tenuous as it was pointless. Whenever it concerned the interminable battle with crime, Bruce Wayne turned into a zealous diehard that was deaf to anybody other than himself, and any attempt to make him listen was nothing but a waste of breath. Nonetheless, even despite keeping all this in mind, Dick refused to go down without at least making his point.

"Bruce, this really isn't a great time," the young man whispered into the phone, doing his best not to display his overfilling irritation.

" _I'm not making the schedule,"_ Batman returned with a dry, commanding tone. _"Suit up, now!"_

Then, before Dick was even able to form any response to that, the connection sharply broke off, leaving him to do only with the immediate order he'd just received. Once again, the young man didn't even get a word in this debate and was forced to just meekly follow the lead. This was one of the things he had grown to hate the most about being Batman's sidekick: the complete domination of Bruce's authority over him with no chance for Dick to ever have his own voice heard. The young man was sick and tired of being pushed around like some tiny little kid and always playing a supporting role where he was inevitably the one to be told what to do. His original nickname might have been 'the Boy Wonder', but he was not a boy anymore – he was a grown man and he wanted to be treated as one. Bruce's lack of regard for his matured persona had already started becoming utterly disrespectful, and Dick felt that he would not be able to tolerate this much longer.

"Yeah, right," the young man disdainfully said aloud in reply to his dark mentor's last line, even though the latter could no longer hear him.

Then, with some somber sense of finality, Dick marched his way back to the ballroom where his girlfriend was waiting for him.

As Dick arrived on the dance floor, he saw Barbara standing by the buffet table with two glasses of punch in her hands. The moment she noticed him, her cute face once again flared up with joy as she hurried toward her beloved, looking to give one drink to him. Unfortunately, Dick wasn't ready to share her mirth because here came the most detestable part of his job of a vigilante – a part where he had to make another ridiculous excuse for her and then hurriedly breeze off. Lying to the face of one of the most important persons in his life, even though it was supposed to be a necessary lie, was even more detestable than being treated as a child by Bruce. Despite the fact that Dick had already found himself in similar situations with Barbara more than a few dozen times before, every time he had to do it again, it always felt just as absurd and disagreeable as it did for the very first time. This was the kind of skill that, for some reason, wouldn't start coming easier to him with its application frequency, and it also was the kind of skill that Dick hadn't been able to sharpen even through the six months of being together with this girl.

"So, where were we?" Barbara mincingly asked her boyfriend as she finally approached him to hold out to him one of the glasses she held.

"Um... Listen, Babs," Dick started twisting around in a very dorky manner, "I'm... really sorry, but I just remembered I promised the guys at the dorm I'd help them clean out the fridge. I'll catch you later."

Then, once again, without even waiting for the girl to process his very weird message, the young man just gave Barbara a quick kiss on the cheek and hastily walked away from her. He certainly understood how ridiculously stupid was the excuse he'd just come up with for her and how cruel and impolite was it for him to walk out on his girlfriend like this right in the middle of the celebration. Unfortunately, so far he hadn't been able to devise any better way of handling this sort of situation. If he'd stayed with Barbara at least a few more minutes longer and allowed her to ask him at least a couple of probing questions, it wouldn't be too long before she put two and two together and uncovered his second identity as Robin. This girl was way too shrewd and quick-witted to be outsmarted in a direct confrontation, so the best he could do to protect his secret was to not leave her any room for interrogation. Dick really hated that it had to be this way, but the alternatives were not something he abounded with at the moment.

As the former member of the Flying Graysons hurriedly headed for the exit from the ballroom, Barbara remained standing on her place in some speechless bewilderment, almost ready to drop both glasses in her hands on the floor out of amazement.

"Clean out the fridge?!" she repeated to herself aloud as if trying to convince herself she had really heard that correct.

Barbara couldn't even tell what had astounded her more about her boyfriend's odd behavior: the lamest excuse he'd just made, which was obviously a lie, or the idea of the kind of emergency that even made him so starkly break for it right from his very graduation party. Yet again, this wasn't the first time when she witnessed Dick getting abruptly entangled in some extremely urgent matters like this. But every time it happened, she also couldn't help noticing how nervous and antsy he would grow when he had to leave in a hurry for whatever reason there was for him. He mentioned once that his 'ghost leaves' often had to do with the many business tasks Mr. Wayne kept on assigning to him from time to time, but Barbara could hardly think of any that would have to overtake him right in the middle of the night when he was celebrating his graduation. The young lady had long since arrived at the conclusion that her lover was hiding something from her, but out of love and respect for Dick, she'd never dared bring this issue up with him. As a future lawyer, she knew better than anyone that every individual had a right to privacy. Moreover, knowing Dick as one of the most decent, conscionable and good-natured persons she'd ever met in her life, she realized that even if there was something for him to hide, then he probably had a pretty good reason for this. Not to mention, Barbara too had one very dark secret that she was hesitating to tell him, so she also knew a thing or two about how tough it could get with certain skeletons in the closet. However, the girl also believed that the mystery she was keeping a lid on was absolutely unique, and whatever it was that Dick was concealing from her could be nowhere near as dangerous and complicated. Because of that, the idea of dating him for almost half a year already and yet still not having deserved his trust to be let into whatever it was that he was hiding still kept on getting to her from time to time. Part of Barbara's character realized that Dick probably just needed a little bit more time and then he would tell her everything himself. But the more adventurous and investigative part of her personality, which sometimes adopted the form of a female vigilante in a cape and mask named Batgirl, was now telling her that she had to act proactively and make sense of all this upon her own initiative...

* * *

 **Blüdhaven – present time**

Joey McIntyre stumblingly walked out of the Blüdhaven Police Department station and then hurriedly made his way down the stairs connecting the doorsteps area of the precinct with the nearest sidewalk. There were a couple dozen cops hanging around outside of the building here and there, some having a smoke, some chatting with each other and some probably just willing to get a breath of fresh air outside of their cramped, stuffy offices. However, none of them seemed to pay much attention to the very antsy and messed-up looking guy hastily exiting their station. That was probably because nobody could even concede the mere idea that a person that could pose a threat to the public order or just potentially mean any trouble would just be so easily allowed his or her way out of the BPD precinct. Joey understood that too, but, nevertheless, still felt very uncomfortable around all those policemen as if at any moment anyone of them could just suddenly get suspicious and then decide to stop him in his tracks. Therefore, the man quickened his pace in order to get away from this gathering of law-enforcers as fast as possible, at the same time continuing to ponder everything to have happened to him recently.

The past eight hours had been one of the most worrying and dramatic in the entire life of Joey McIntyre. First, the gang he worked for had embarked on an unprecedented mission to commit robbery of Blüdhaven Bank – the very place Joey was officially employed with on a daily basis as a security guard and thus had exclusive access to. The security personnel pass card he possessed was supposed to make his gang's venture go without as much as a hitch, and, at first, everything really seemed to have been going this way. But then, all out of the blue, some masked vigilante that referred to himself as 'Nightwing' crashed their party and just ruined their entire game plan. Not only he prevented them from completing their mission – he actually single-handedly took out their whole gang man by man, until there was only Joey left who wasn't knocked out cold. Joey couldn't have imagined such course of events even in his worst nightmare. He thought that working in a group full of professional armed-to-the-teeth criminals under the leadership of no one else but Blüdhaven's most powerful kingpin was an ironclad guarantee of his safety. However, that Nightwing freak managed to shatter all his illusions in what seemed to be less than a twinkle of an eye. The way how effortlessly he stopped their entire group made Joey fathom that neither their numbers, nor their weapons, nor even their Boss's protection actually meant a damn thing. Their gang was not and had never been untouchable or invincible – it was only the matter of someone having enough guts and willpower to step up to the plate and take them head on. Unfortunately for Joey, this someone showed up on the exact same night when the former was on duty.

Joey turned out to be completely unprepared for this kind of outcome. The prospect of getting caught right in the middle of such a serious crime as armed bank robbery as part of an organized crime group and then going to prison for the rest of his life was simply too terrifying. This fear had caused Joey to act recklessly and do something he now wasn't feeling very proud of – taking one of the subdued bank guards hostage and then trying to use that hostage as leverage in persuading the vigilante to let him out of the building. Joey never really meant to go that far or that low. In fact, he'd never even hurt a man ever before in his entire life. His crime record might have always been far from clean, but everything he'd ever been involved with was mostly just thefts and robberies – no violent crimes or any other wrongdoings that would put another person's life or health in danger. He couldn't even tell now whether he had actually meant it when he said he would slit that hostage's throat unless the vigilante would let him go or when he tried to shoot the vigilante point-blank into the head. He was so desperate to avoid getting caught at that moment that his desperation had completely clouded his judgment and his conscious mind. He was merely following his instinct for self-preservation, clinging to whatever scraps of hope he could find around him. However, despite Joey's frantic state and all the threats he'd been blustering out, that Nightwing was still able to stop him without letting any of the hostages get hurt. Part of Joey was now even glad that he had been able to prevent him from doing something he would have then deeply regretted for the rest of his life. However, that feeling of gladness was 'slightly' downgraded by the fact that the vigilante then had turned the tables on Joey himself and intimidated him into telling the name of his Boss and the location where their gang was supposed to take the money stolen from the Bank. Only unlike Joey, the vigilante was successful in achieving the desired result with his threats. The realization of this had brought Joey's already panicked state even further. He knew that if Blockbuster found out that he had spilled the information on him to someone else, Joey wouldn't be safe even in his prison cell. That was, of course, provided that he would even make it to his imprisonment in the first place.

After the police arrived at the Bank, Joey for the first time actually realized how badly screwed he was. The case that the cops would be able to build against him was going to be bulletproof: caught red-handed right at the scene of the crime, with nearly a dozen witnesses to testify against their whole gang and himself in particular. His accomplices would probably also not hesitate a second to sell him out when finally driven into a corner during the interrogations. But what was even worse was that Joey had been the only one of his gang to get unmasked during the robbery and thus having his face exposed to some of the captive security guards. That would also make him the easiest target for the witnesses to tab during the criminal identification procedure to follow afterwards. With so much evidence against him, there was no way Joey could escape an imprisonment. There were no alternatives, gaps or loopholes left for him. Even if theoretically Blockbuster had tried to use his connections in the police to get their gang out, a case that solid should have been beyond even his powerful influence. Joey realized he was completely out of luck here, and, eventually, he would find himself behind bars.

When the cops put handcuffs on Joey and then closed the reinforced door of their transportation van behind him, he felt scared like never before in his entire life. But it wasn't going to jail that he was afraid of. He had already dealt with some penitentiary institutions before, and though the experience might have been far from pleasant, it wasn't something that could terrify him at this point of life anymore. What he was really afraid of was what his daughter and wife would think when they found out that their husband and daddy was a lowlife criminal. He didn't lie to that vigilante when he told him that he had a family to take care of. At home waiting for him were his wife and his daughter who, of course, had no foggiest idea about what Joey was sometimes doing at night. They naively believed that he was just an ordinary law-abiding bank guard who sometimes had to work nightshift to get some extra pay. Of course, that was one of the template excuses Joey would tell them to justify his frequent failing to come home at night or the suspiciously big bucks he kept bringing into the family budget after carrying out yet another dirty commission for Blockbuster.

Joey didn't exactly admire of this kind of method of making earnings. It wasn't because of his profound respect and regard for the law and public order, though, but because of his general distaste for having to lie to his dearest and closest all the time. As a matter of fact, half of the reason for Joey to choose this slick path of lies and crime was his desperate urge to make life better for his family. He had spent well over three decades of his life in Blüdhaven, and ever since early childhood he'd been witnessing how the honest and decent people of this city were forced to suffer in poverty, humiliation and defeat, while those who simply spat upon the law, the morality and the lives of others easily got everything they wanted, with no vengeance or retribution to ever come back to haunt them afterwards. Joey hated that things had to be this way. He hated that justice didn't mean a damn thing in this town and that the law here only worked for those who had money and power. He hated this, but at the same time, he realized that he could never change anything about this rotten-to-the-core system. The only thing that was within his power to do was to adapt to it. His wife and daughter never even once complained to him about the quality of the life they had, but he always felt they were wishing for something much more than just the gray, tasteless existence of a Blüdhaven's lower class family. They most certainly deserved way better that that and he hated himself for not being able to give it to them with his humble salary of a bank guard. Therefore, since Joey realized he was unable to win this battle on his own, he decided to join the winners. However, he never could imagine that playing on the winner team would one day lead him to losing so miserably.

Upon arriving at the BPD station, the cops put Joey and the rest of his gang-mates into separate holding cells to make sure none of them could communicate with each other before the interrogations. Robbery of Blüdhaven Bank was a very big and very serious case that could offer plenty of opportunities for job promotions, so all the policemen involved with arresting Joey's crime group were interested in handling the matter as legibly and swiftly as possible. Therefore, the investigation officers decided not to wait for the next day's morning to come to start questioning the arrestees and kicked off the interrogations just a couple of hours after the apprehension. Quite coincidently, Joey was the very first one of the gang to be 'invited' to the investigation officer. He wasn't very surprised with this kind of choice made by the cops; just like before, he thought it had to do with his earlier unmasking in front of the captive bank guards and the fact that he had also left his pass-card at the crime scene, thus practically handing himself to the police on a platter. However, shortly after he was taken from his cell to the interrogation room, he realized that the reason for him to be the first pick was a little more complicated than he imagined.

When the two officers dragging Joey to the interrogation room by the arms almost reached their destination point, one of them suddenly gave a loud groan of pain as if having been hit hard and even doubled up with what appeared to be some serious discomfort. The other cop asked him wonderingly what was wrong, and then, to Joey's unpleasant astonishment, the pain-struck officer replied that Joey had attacked him, although Joey hadn't as much as laid a finger on him. Before the latter was able to raise any objection to that, a rubber hose already hit him into the abdomen, taking the whole wind out of his lungs and making him crook up in pain just like the policeman had before. That baton shot was quickly followed by another one that had come from the policeman who must have decided to retaliate against his alleged assailant. Joey had no clue why those two cops had so suddenly decided to go all power-drunk on him but thought it was just another display of abuse of authority that many Blüdhaven policemen were so infamous for. Therefore, he didn't even try to stand up to them or call for help. Unfortunately, it then turned out that the two officers weren't going to stop at that as then the one to have falsely accused Joey of attacking him told his partner he wanted to have a minute with Joey in private. The other cop at first tried to dissuade him out of this idea, stating they should do everything according to the book, but the former assured him that he would keep it quiet and covert, so his partner reluctantly agreed to stand on the lookout while the other one would be teaching Joey a lesson. As a result, instead of the interrogation room Joey was dragged into some deep corner of the building where more physical punishment should have awaited him.

As Joey already prepared to take a beating of his life, further strange things continued to happen to him. Once he found himself face-to-face with that cop, safe from any prying eyes, instead of starting to beat him up, the officer just pressed Joey hard against the wall and covered the latter's mouth with his palm to prevent him from making a sound. Then the policeman began to hurriedly talk to Joey in a hushed voice. Without any introductions or explanations the cop just imperatively told Joey that when the investigation officer would ask him about what had transpired at Blüdhaven Bank, Joey should have told that he was returning to the Bank because he'd left there some of his personal stuff. Then he'd got ambushed by a gang of thugs that had taken his pass-card and used it to get into the Bank. As far as the other details of what had happened there were concerned, the cop told Joey to say that he'd been knocked out unconscious and hadn't seen or heard anything until the police had arrived. After this brief overview of the false testimony that Joey had been told to give to the investigation officer, the cop that was cornering him also said that if Joey was as much as to go against any of his instructions or tell anyone about this conversation they'd just had, he would never even make it to the trials. Joey who still had his mouth tightly covered by the policeman's hand was never allowed to voice any objection or question to that threat and could only do the last thing that was left for him in this predicament, which was to give a nod of his silent consent.

After that private talk was over, the cop dragged Joey back to the interrogation room. The conversation with him had left the former Bank guard in an even bigger shock than anything he'd been through before that moment. He realized that that cop must have been one of Blockbuster's corrupt agents in the BPD and thus should have been sent to him upon his very Boss's direction. Joey always knew that Blockbuster had his own connections in the police; however, he never could've imagined those connections could reach that deep. Nonetheless, the method that his Boss had picked to handle this situation had still left plenty of reservations with Joey. Namely, how was Blockbuster planning to ensure that the rest of Joey's gang-mates would tell the exact same story he'd just been ordered to tell the investigation officer during _their_ interrogations? And how was he going to get them all out if that same legend couldn't work for them as well? And, more importantly, how was Blockbuster looking to get rid of all the evidence left at the crime scene and of all the witnesses to have seen what had really happened there? With all those questions arising in his mind, Joey could hardly make himself believe in the feasibility of the scheme that he'd been instructed to follow. At the same time, he realized he had no better alternatives of his own, so perhaps the best there was for him to do at that moment was to confide in his Boss's vision and assume he had all those things covered already.

When it finally came to the interrogation, Joey decided not to press his luck and did everything exactly as it had been told to him. Thus, he shared with the investigation officer the very legend that his Boss had designed for him. Joey hadn't had much time to thoroughly think his phony story through, so whenever the investigation officer would ask him some elaborative questions like what personal stuff he had left at the Bank that had made him return there in the middle of the night or why the police had found him at the crime scene handcuffed just like the gangsters, he couldn't help getting stumped awkwardly and then starting to mumble something indiscreet in response. Everything to have happened to Joey over that night had been very hectic and very stressful, which couldn't have failed to make him feel extremely nervous and uncollected when interrogated. But the biggest part of Joey's edginess was his complete lack of faith in the efficiency of this whole shtick he'd been playing out. He was dead sure that his story was totally unconvincing and that there was no way it would find confirmation among either his gang-mates or the witnesses.

However, quite surprisingly, the investigation officer that was questioning him didn't try to dig too deep and even appeared to have believed his legend. At some point, Joey even suspected that he had also been bribed by Blockbuster just like the cop that had brought him here, and this whole examination was nothing but another fake formality that just needed to be followed in order to get him out. Anyhow, once through with interrogating Joey, the investigation officer gave him a couple of papers to sign which the latter didn't even bother reading before doing so, and also told him that if his testimony would be backed up by the evidence to be collected from the crime scene and other witness statements, he would later be required to appear in court to give testimony as a witness in this case. Then, before Joey was even able to process all this information, the interrogation officer declared to him that he was free to go. Of all the shockers Joey had heard that night, that one definitely took the cake. He was no expert in criminal investigation procedures but he could hardly believe that a person found by the police at a scene of a bank robbery together with an entire group of suspects and witnesses could be so simply let out of custody before the rest of the arrestees were even questioned yet. Either he was completely incompetent in such kind of matters or he had underestimated Blockbuster's influence even more than he'd let himself believe. But regardless of his disbelief, he would have been the world's biggest fool if he'd let such one-of-a-lifetime opportunity slip away from him. Therefore, as soon as he got his release document, he hastened to exit the police station before the investigation officer changed his mind.

Now Joey was walking away from the BPD precinct a free man as if what had happened earlier that night at Blüdhaven Bank had been just a bad dream. Still, he just couldn't make himself believe that everything could be that simple. He'd been involved with not just any crime, but with robbery of a city bank as part of an organized crime syndicate. Moreover, he'd been busted in the very middle of it and caught by the police. Going to jail after something like that was supposed to be an inevitable outcome, but instead, all it took to avoid it was just one bullshit fairy tale which credibility no one would have even bothered to check. It just didn't make any sense. Joey realized that he should have been happy that everything had worked out for him like that, but his dismay with the way how easily the entire system in this town could be turned inside out was not allowing him to fully enjoy his freedom. Was it really so that the law in Blüdhaven was completely impotent against people like his Boss? And if it truly was, did that mean that the limits of Blockbuster's influence in this town were practically infinite?

Soon Joey decided to dismiss all these intrusive thoughts from his mind. The only important thing now was that he had not ended up in prison after last night, and that alone was a reason enough to feel happy. Now he had to return home to his family and do it fast. He wasn't sure whether the news about the robbery of Blüdhaven Bank had already hit the mass media broadcasts, but if it had, and his wife had already seen or heard one of those, she was probably very worried now. Now, if luck would have had it, he would be back before she'd learned about the robbery from someone else, and, hopefully, she wouldn't even suspect that his part in this play was a little more involving than just being at the wrong place and the wrong time. Joey realized that this whole story itself was far from over yet, and there were going to be further repercussions in the nearest future: new summons for interrogations, the upcoming trial of the robbery case, most probably also some unpleasant conversation with his crime Boss, maybe even new charges pressed against him... However, right now he didn't want to fixate on any of that. He just wanted to return to his wife and daughter and get some rest after everything he'd been through. Whatever new challenges awaited him ahead, he was going to deal with them later, when the time for that was right.

Unfortunately for Joey, some of the repercussions he didn't wish to deal with at this point had caught up with him a little earlier than he expected. As he got about three house blocks away from the BPD station, a long black limousine suddenly drove over to the sidewalk he was walking along and started slowly rolling across the road level with him. Joey quickly figured out that the limo was after him, which at once gave him the idea of who this pompous vehicle could belong to. Nonetheless, he tried to pretend he wasn't paying attention to the car driving along and quickened his pace in an attempt to distance himself from it. But the people sitting inside the limo weren't going to let Joey walk away so easily as then the luxury vehicle put on some speed for a couple of seconds and drove ahead of him. Then the car stopped and out of its rear door walked a tall vigorous man dressed in a grey full-body suit with a black shirt and a purple necktie. He was also wearing sunglasses, although it wasn't exactly sunny in Blüdhaven that day. Joey hadn't seen that guy before but instantly noticed that the latter looked exactly like some of Blockbuster's elite henchmen that usually communicated with their gang on his behalf. Nonetheless, even despite understanding that he was probably being approached by his Boss's people, Joey still continued persistently pretending to be oblivious to that and tried to pass by the man to have walked out of the limo as if not recognizing the hints. That was when the man in a suit briskly grabbed him by the arm right before Joey could march past him.

"Mr. McIntyre, hold on please," the supposed gangster addressed himself to the former bank guard, finally making him stop in mid-stride.

Joey felt a very unpleasant feeling of startle sharply sting at the back of his head the moment the man in a suit referred to him by name. This forced him to finally do what he'd been desperately trying to avoid all along, which was to look his interlocutor in the face.

"Who are you? How do you know my name?" Joey asked him, sharply pulling his arm out of the man's grip.

"Mr. McIntyre, I know a lot more than just your name since you and I happen to work for the one and same employer," the man in a suit returned in a very formal and polite tone, his posture, though, still looking very formidable. "And as far as who I am - believe me, this isn't important right now. What _is_ important is that our Boss wants to have a word with you, and I'm here to take you to him."

This statement was the final push needed for Joey to completely give in to anxiety. Now there was no shadow of a doubt left that Blockbuster had been the one behind his unlikely release from custody, and everything to have been happening to him up until this moment had been carefully orchestrated by his Boss. Moreover, this also confirmed that Blockbuster was well aware of the last night's failed robbery of Blüdhaven Bank and all the complications it had resulted in. Now he was probably looking to give a piece of his mind to everyone responsible for the ruined operation and all the moves he had to make on his part to rectify that. But why did Blockbuster single out specifically him among everyone in the gang to start this 'witch hunt'? Could it be that his Boss had somehow already found out that he'd divulged the information on him to that vigilante? But how could he have learned about it so fast and, more importantly, from whom? The idea didn't seem to make much sense, but the appearing lack thereof didn't make the prospect feel any less terrifying.

"Um, listen, right now isn't the best time," Joey started awkwardly trying to talk his way out of this. "I've only just been let go by the police, I need to get back home – my family is probably very worried now."

Upon saying that, Joey attempted to resume making his way past the man in a suit, but the latter grabbed him by the arm again, this time even harder.

"I don't think you understand, Mr. McIntyre," he said calmly, but sternly, "The Boss didn't request your attendance – he _ordered_ it. And his order is to be fulfilled regardless of your personal preferences. Unfortunately, your family will have to wait a little more time."

On that phrase, two more lugs walked out of the limousine and stood either sides of the man holding Joey by the arm. Both were also formally dressed but were even taller and more broad-shouldered than the one talking to Joey right now. They were also holding their right hands rested somewhere behind their suits, their palms most likely placed on the handles of their guns. The former security guard quickly realized that the room for debate was denied him here, so he had no other choice but to play by the dictated rules.

"Fine," Joey surrendered to his Boss's henchmen at last and slowly headed for the opened rear door of the limo, the three thugs following him close.

Once sitting inside the limo, Joey finally got to see how cozy life could get for those in Blüdhaven who had the guts to choose the path of crime. He'd never taken a ride in a limousine ever before in his life, so the experience was almost everything he could expect of a famous luxury car like this: roomy compartment, comfortable seats, plenty of built-in high-tech features. Unfortunately, Joey couldn't fully enjoy his time in this expensive car due to his growing agitation and the uncomfortably close presence of the Blockbuster's henchmen sitting in the car together with him. Also, the moment the vehicle started off, the side windows got eclipsed over by some blacked-out screens that prevented Joey from seeing the direction they were driving in. This only added more tension to the already very unfriendly atmosphere of this ride.

After about 20 minutes spent on the road in complete silence, Joey finally mustered the courage to break it by putting a question to his fellow passengers.

"Where exactly are we going?" he asked the man sitting opposite of him that he'd had a dialogue with earlier before.

"Patience, Mr. McIntyre," his Boss's henchman returned imperturbably without even looking at him, "Soon you'll see everything for yourself."

Then, after a few more minutes of driving, Joey sensed how the car came to a smooth stop for short while and then continued to move as if descending off an incline. It lasted a couple more minutes, whereupon the limo came to its final stop and the thug sitting opposite of Joey told him they had reached their destination.

Upon exiting the limo, Joey discovered they were now in some underground parking lot. There weren't many cars parked there, but those he clapped his eyes upon impressed him with their caliber: every last one was an expensive foreign import model like Lamborghini, Ferrari, Veyron and others. It wasn't clear yet whether they all belonged to Blockbuster and his people or there were other rich crime lords using this parking lot along with him, but the selection was still remarkable. For a moment, the former security guard even forgot about his disquietude in anticipation of meeting his Boss and just stared transfixed at the multitude of pompous vehicles around him. But it was only until one of the bigger thugs he'd come here with gruffly shoved him into the back and strictly told him to keep going.

Joey and his three companions made their way for an elevator leading to the upper floors of whatever building they were in now. The elevator turned out to be accessible only to the authorized occupants of the premise as its door would only open when one of the thugs accompanying Joey pressed a key card to its electronic lock. Then, as the group walked into it, Joey got amazed by the number of available options to go for which he saw on the elevator's button bar. Most buildings in Blüdhaven usually didn't have more than four or five floors, but this one appeared to go well above ten of those. Quite strangely, even after living in this town for so long, Joey couldn't even tell on the spot where such unlikely tall structure could be located. Perhaps, it was some new construction project on the outskirts of the city, and he simply hadn't seen it yet. Anyhow, Blockbuster's office happened to be located at the very summit of this giant of a building as one of his henchmen standing in the lift with Joey then pressed the topmost floor button. Apparently, their Boss was on top of Blüdhaven's food chain in more than just one sense of this word, and Joey was just about to find out how close that expression was to reality.

Upon arriving at the upper floor, the three thugs walked Joey through a whole chain of corridors and passageways partitioned from one another by more sets of braced locked doors. Joey was very surprised to discover that the electronic anti-intrusion and identification systems installed at Blüdhaven Bank were totally put to shame by what his Boss had at his headquarters. Some of the access panels Joey kept on passing through included even such exotic security features as fingerprint scanners or voice recognition systems – something no amount of brute force or computer hacking skills like the ones they used to rob Blüdhaven Bank could overcome. It was astonishing and at the same time dreadful to fathom that in this town an office of a crime lord was better protected than the biggest city bank where thousands of honest, law-abiding, hard-working people had their money and funds stored – the money they needed not for some luxurious excesses but for basic needs so they could simply live their lives and feed their families. The more Joey kept learning about the life of the people that he worked for, the more he hated them for what they were... and the more he hated himself for having become one of them...

After crossing all the jealously guarded oblongs leading to Blockbuster's office, Joey and the company finally ended up on the doorsteps of their Boss' actual residence. Entering the main door got them into a vast expanse of classy, modern interiors consisting of many glass and metallic décor elements and other progressive designs like those one could usually see in offices of large, successful business companies. The entrance area even had a reception desk with two stalwart-looking security guards dressed in black standing either sides of it. And sitting by that desk was a young girl who couldn't be older than twenty, yet already had a bleached blonde hair, tons of makeup on her face, unnaturally plush lips that could only look like that because of considerable amounts of botox pumped into them, as well as a very deep cleavage on her blouse that exposed her equally unnaturally large breast which must have also underwent some surgery earlier before to be of such size now. The girl was so busy polishing her long crimson red fingernails with a file she didn't even pay attention to the entry of the four visitors until the one to have halted Joey in the street casually approached her.

"Hey Lindsey, how's life?" he greeted the girl with a standard small-talk phrase. "Is the Boss in his office?"

The girl at the reception desk didn't even bother lifting her gaze at the man and remained fixed on her manicures.

"He is, but he's busy now and isn't seeing anyone," she replied in a thin, piping, uninterested voice.

The guy in a suit smiled at that reply and said,

"Well, I'm sure that he'll change his mind after we introduce to him our guest."

With that, he gave a nod to his friends standing with Joey at the entrance and then headed for the door to the left. The two bigger thugs quickly grabbed Joey by both arms and gruffly dragged him to where their partner had made his way for. The closer they were getting to finally meeting Blockbuster, the less ceremoniousness they kept displaying toward Joey, and the former bank guard was starting to have an unpleasant feeling this wasn't going to be the worst kind of treatment he was going to get that day.

As Joey finally got hauled into the office of his Boss, his sight was at once struck by the dimensions of the room he found himself in. Blockbuster's office turned out to be so vast it seemed to be capable of containing a couple of average small companies with their entire staffs in it. However, the reason for Blüdhaven's biggest crime lord to have such a capacious personal premise was not so obvious yet since about three quarters of its space were almost totally bare. There was only a huge library case full of books running along the whole length of the right wall and some closets, wardrobes and showcases standing against the left one. The center of the room was practically empty, while Blockbuster's desk was at the far end of the room, looming large on the lightly background of a huge floor-to-ceiling window. Given the height of the building and the fact that they were on the topmost floor now, that window could probably admit view on the entire city of Blüdhaven. Some of the picturesque urban landscapes visible through it could already be distinguished even from where Joey was standing, but instead, it was something else that caught the former security guard's attention. Showing against the shroud of daylight coming through the window were the bedimmed silhouette of a leather armchair standing by the desk. The chair had its back turned to the entrance to the office, so the person sitting in it couldn't be descried yet. Nonetheless, what already struck Joey's eye was the notable bulkiness of that furniture item: it was almost four times the size of an ordinary armchair both in length and at width, as if it was designed for someone having monstrous proportions. In fact, only now Joey began to notice that almost every piece of the local interior had somewhat enlarged metrics to it, just like the space of the room itself. This all was making a very odd and very disturbing impression on him, which together with his already overfilling trepidation before meeting his Boss was starting to make Joey feel really uncomfortable.

Once the door behind the four men in the room was closed, the thug to have been the first to enter the office gave a quiet cough as if politely signaling about his presence in the room and then addressed himself to the mysterious figure sitting in the armchair,

"Sir, pardon us for bothering you, but we have..."

However, before he was able to finish that phrase, he was cut off by a deep booming voice coming from afore,

"I think I specifically instructed Lindsey not to let anybody into my office now," the man who appeared to be the one and only Blockbuster interrupted him with a menacing reproach to his tone. "I wonder if it's her that I need to fire for failing to adequately deliver my message or if it's you, Ricky, for your failing to adequately comply with it. Or, maybe, it should be the both of you..."

The mobster whose name appeared to be Ricky slightly stretched the collar of his shirt as if feeling hot and cleared his throat yet another time.

"Sir, I profoundly apologize for interrupting you while you're busy, but I believe you might find the cause reasonably justified," he meekly groveled before his Boss with audible fear in his voice. "We have brought to you McIntyre, just as you instructed."

There was a short moment of silence to follow that statement. All three gangsters tensed visibly, thrillingly awaiting the reaction of their leader. Joey was feeling equally worried, his knees already shaking under him and his throat starting to have a sickening feeling of lump form in it.

"Although it's still no excuse to disturb me when I'm in process of calculating another business plan, you may consider yourself excused this time, Ricky," Blockbuster returned in a very intimidating, yet surprisingly eloquent form of speech. "After all, your lack of manners is just a result of your inferior intellect."

The kingpin made another short pause as if letting his henchmen stomach his words, then added,

"Besides, the issue involving Mr. McIntyre really is a pending one. And now would be as good time as any to finally address it."

After that phrase, the armchair behind the desk finally turned around, exposing the person sitting in it to view. But the sight to have been revealed to Joey's eyes nearly rendered him catatonic with its hideousness. The appearance of the man he'd been working for this entire time but had never seen or met before turned out to be nothing short of repulsive. For an instant, the former bank guard couldn't even understand if he was looking at a human being or at some monster or mutant. The man sitting before him happened to be a massive brutish looking hulk with disturbingly oversized bodily constitution. He had long and thick bulky arms, unbelievably broad chest and shoulders, as well as hands that seemed to be the size of Joey's head. The face was simply a nightmare: an ugly bulbous half-bald cranium full of thick, bulgy veins, with disgusting bushes of long, sloven, greasy hair growing on its sides and hanging down to his shoulders like some popsicles in the frost and passing into equally long and messy sideburns on his cheeks. He also had an unpleasantly prominent forehead like that of some prehistoric caveman, which hung over his bushy eyebrows and bizarre sinister eyes. Despite all these horrific, nearly savage features, the man was dressed in what seemed to be a very expensive suit with a shirt and a tie and even had some other glamorous accessories to his garb like diamond cuff-links and a golden tie-pin and some very impressive looking watch on his left wrist. His appearance and his dressing style made a very contrasting combination, which thus only added more bloodcurdling perversity to his overall exterior view.

As Joey continued processing his Boss's horrendous habits through his dumbfounded mind, Blockbuster rose from his chair and made his way toward him. That action caused Joey to freak out even more as that was the moment when he finally got to see the scary crime lord stand to his full height. Blockbuster also happened to be no less than eight feet tall - an absolute giant of a man and clearly a total freak of nature. It kept getting harder and harder for Joey to believe that he was looking at a real human and not at some imaginary beast from a bad dream. But with each next step Blockbuster kept making in his direction the former security guard was coming to an unfortunate realization that even if it was a bad dream, there was still no waking up from it for him.

In a few moments, Blockbuster finally stood a mere foot away from Joey, towering over him with all his imposing stature like Leviathan. Joey could no longer hide his terror and was now shivering with fright unabashed as the shade cast by his Boss's gargantuan body screened him completely. The two thugs holding him by the arms were also visibly uneasy around the juggernaut of a man standing in front of them, even though they had already seen him before. As for Blockbuster, he just continued to stand on his place and silently stare down Joey who seemed to be moments away from being flattened out just by the weight of his Boss's hard gaze on him. Then the oversized crime lord smiled ominously and offered the frightened little man his hand.

"Welcome to my office, Mr. McIntyre," he greeted Joey in an unexpectedly friendly manner, "A pleasure to meet you in person at last."

Joey remained standing on his spot nearly petrified, simply unable to squeeze a word or move out of himself. Part of him was certainly relieved that his Boss appeared to be so favorably disposed, but the shock from discovering who he actually was just couldn't wear off so fast. When Joey's inertness began to drag on, one of the two thugs standing either sides of him slightly jabbed him with an elbow into the shoulder to wake him out of his stupor. That was when Joey finally extended his trembling, sweaty hand to his Boss. Blockbuster's massive paw easily engulfed Joey's tiny palm as if a grown man was shaking a hand of a baby. After that, the oversized crime lord snobbishly reached for his suit's pocket and took out a handkerchief to wipe his own hand from Joey's sweat. It was certainly weird to see such brutishly looking man display this kind of squeamishness. But then again, there was obviously more to Blockbuster than just the brutish appearance.

Once the ceremonies were done with, Blockbuster headed back to his workplace. Thereupon, the two gangsters guarding Joey quickly grabbed him by the arms again and dragged him along to their Boss's desk. Meanwhile, the crime lord continued speaking to his guest,

"My apologies for summoning you on such short notice, Mr. McIntyre," he went on talking in his very formal and eloquent language – another apparent trait of his character that also stood out against his wildish visage, "Unfortunately, the circumstances have forced me to act at a rapid pace."

Then, after sitting down by the desk again and seeing that Joey was still skulking up around his henchmen, he also told him,

"Please have a seat."

Upon that phrase, the two thugs relinquished their hold of Joey who was more than happy to sit on one of the smaller chairs for visitors standing in front of his Boss's desk and finally give his flabby legs some rest.

"Mr. McIntyre," Blockbuster took the word again once Joey was sitting opposite of him, "I assume you already have an idea why I have so urgently requested your presence in my office."

Joey who had just barely managed to start pulling himself together from all the new information he'd obtained over the past few hours felt another wave of consternation rush into his mind after he heard his Boss's assumption. He knew Blockbuster was referring to their gang's unachieved mission to commit robbery of Blüdhaven Bank last night and, possibly, all the difficulties it had cost him as a result. Such kind of topic wasn't easy to discuss with any Boss, let alone, with the one that could crush him literally with one hand.

"Mr. Blockbuster..." Joey mumbled discomposedly once he was able to force himself into voicing his first words before his interlocutor interrupted him,

"Please, call me Mr. Desmond," the kingpin of Blüdhaven suddenly declared to him very amicably. "'Blockbuster' is just a pseudonym that I use for interactions with the world outside of these walls. However, there's no need for such formalities here, among the members of our cartel."

Joey was very surprised with how easily the man whose mere nickname was supposed to be a mystery behind seven seals had shared his real name with him. Such kind of trust placed into him even helped the former bank guard relax a little and continue this dialogue in a more eased modality.

"Mr. Desmond, sir," Joey corrected himself, "I believe you want to talk about last night's robbery of Blüdhaven Bank."

"That's certainly one way of putting it," Blockbuster returned dryly, "But I expect you to be a tad more specific than that."

Joey took a deep breath through his nostrils to calm himself and then went on,

"Yes, of course, sir! I'm... I'm extremely sorry that we couldn't get the job done yesterday. It's just... we were ambushed by that crazy vigilante! He called himself..."

"...Nightwing," the crime lord finished the sentence for him, sounding totally unimpressed. "Believe me, Mr. McIntyre, I'm well aware of that already. But that's not what I summoned you here for to talk about. You see, I wouldn't take so much trouble as bribing the local policemen to get you out of custody just for the sake of listening to your pathetic excuses. Besides, Mr. McIntyre, I'm a man of intelligence. As much as I would love to blame the unsuccess of last night's operation on one solitary person, I do realize that a failed task carried out by a whole group of people cannot be the fault of just one single man - it's always a result of collective lack of professionalism and competence of everyone involved."

After this tirade, Blockbuster stately tipped back in his armchair and added,

"No, Mr. McIntyre, you weren't brought here to talk about how sorry you are for what your gang failed to do last night. You're here because I want to talk with you about something _you_ in particular did. Like, for instance, your conversation with that Nightwing individual, during which you fed to him some information on me and our operation."

Joey felt how the sickening feeling of a lump in his throat had returned to him with renewed intensity. Furthermore, he sensed how his mouth had become nearly ash-dry as if having lost all its spit in one single moment. Now it was crystal clear that Blockbuster really was aware of everything, including Joey's embarrassing interrogation by that damn vigilante freak. How his Boss had uncovered this information was beyond him, but now that Joey knew for certain he had, he realized there was nowhere to run and no place to hide from it for him. The only thing that was left for him to do now was to admit his fault and pray that Blockbuster would not take this whole story too close to his heart. However, the mere thought of what this monster of a man could do to him for his mistake was paralyzing Joey with the most soul-chilling dread, making him unable to constrain himself to utter a word. So instead of starting to present his case and apologize for his actions, the former bank guard just sat dumb in his chair, his whole body sweating profusely and his eyes shifting with mute nervousness.

Blockbuster wasn't pressing his guest for a reply, obviously relishing in watching Joey helplessly drown in his own terror and anxiety like this. However, Blüdhaven's biggest crime lord was also a very busy man who valued his time. Therefore, as much as he would have loved to continue savoring the moment of somebody else's suffering, he also knew he had other pressing issues to attend to. So, at some point of this lingering pause, the kingpin just took the word for his interlocutor instead,

"Mr. McIntyre, I can tell by your deafening silence and by the very puzzled look in your eyes that you're feeling very confused now," Blockbuster said in his always angular and lenient tone, "And I believe that the source of your confusion is your incomprehension of how I obtained the information about your slip-up in the first place."

Upon that phrase, Blockbuster leaned forward in his chair and put his huge hands on the desk, folding them.

"Well, Mr. McIntyre, before you finally start explaining yourself, let me explain something to you, first," he went on. "You see, the nature of my business requires me to recruit a lot of outsiders into my business network – people that I don't know and can't always be sure I can trust. Unfortunately, that's one of the many risks you have to take if you want to extend the sphere of your influence and establish a really wide-spread, prolific crime empire. However, where there are risks involved, there should be some management thereof applied as well."

Then the oversized crime lord shifted his gaze somewhere sideways as if getting absorbed deep in thoughts, although never ceasing to continue speaking to Joey,

"Most of my colleagues from other towns and cities usually try to ensure their personnel's loyalty by using intimidation or persecution as a means of guaranteeing their silence. Personally, I find such approach crude and ineffective. You see, being a man of superior intelligence, I understand that, first of all, you cannot expect loyalty from people who are incapable of it by their very nature. Second of all, intimidation only works against people who have enough common sense to perceive it; to divide primary things from secondary ones, to fathom the consequences of the threat that's being used against them. Quite sadly, though, the majority of individuals out there aren't so smart. Most tend to respond not to the most dangerous but to the most imminent threats, completely forgetting about the prioritization of their perils."

After this long line, the kingpin turned his evil eyes back to Joey and added,

"And you, Mr. McIntyre, are a perfect example of this adverse tendency."

As Joey heard that reproaching declaration made by his Boss, he felt his heart sink in his chest. His hope that Blockbuster wouldn't be mad at him for his yielding to that Nightwing's threats had just died right in front of him. Now the former security guard could only be further horrified by the idea of the kind of punishment Blüdhaven's biggest crime lord would administer to him for his betrayal. Joey felt to be moments away from puking all over his Boss's desk from the unbearable stress, and the only thing that was preventing him from it was his even stronger awe of making things worse for himself than they already were.

"However, I think we've started to deviate from the subject at hand, so let's get back to it," Blockbuster casually resumed the thread, waking Joey back out of his nearly cataleptic trance. "Even though I find it impossible to safeguard the loyalty of some employees, the risks connected with this still need to be addressed somehow. And I believe the best way of doing that is to keep close track of everyone that my closest agents commission to carry out my tasks. Which is why, Mr. McIntyre, before sending your team on a mission to rob Blüdhaven Bank, I had everyone of you secretly tagged with eavesdropping devices."

After his Boss shared that information with him, Joey's uneasiness even gave place to wonder for an instant. Now he finally understood how his Boss had found out about the fiasco of their operation, as well as about the vigilante and everything else. That also explained how he had been able to orchestrate Joey's phony release from police custody so fast. But if Blockbuster was really pissed at him for leaking a word to that Nightwing, why did he get him out of BPD in the first place? Why not just let the police trump up a full case on him so he would have had to stand trial and then eventually go to prison for the rest of his life? He hardly knew anything about Blockbuster other than his nickname, so what valuable information could he possibly disclose to the police or to the judges if he had been left at their mercy? This just didn't add up.

Joey was already about to delve into musings regarding his Boss's strange motives, when his train of thoughts got interrupted again,

"Yes, Mr. McIntyre, I've been able to hear every single word you uttered and every single sound you made last night," Blockbuster continued explicating his previous line in the meantime, "And some of the things that I've heard didn't exactly please me."

The hardness in the crime lord's voice and the visible anger in his eyes made Joey remember that instead of trying to figure out his Boss's intentions, he still had a lot of explanation to do. So he finally managed to break out of his long period of torpor and start maintaining the dialogue with Blockbuster,

"M-Mr. Desmond, s-sir, I... I'm sorry..." the former Bank guard began to stutter fearfully. "I would never ever betray you... But that v-vigilante... Th-that Nightwing... he forced me to give him the information... He... he tortured me! P-please, you have to forgive me!"

Blockbuster only sneered cynically in response to Joey's squall of pleas, clearly not taking any of them too seriously.

"Mr. McIntyre, with all due respect, I find the word 'tortured' to be way too strong here," he returned unimpressed again. "You see, I've certainly heard you scream in pain when I was listening to your conversation with that vigilante over the telecoms, which suggested to me that he really did resort to some physical violence to make you talk. However, now that you're sitting in front of me in my own office, I don't see you to be missing any of your eyes, ears, teeth, fingers or other vital organs and body parts. Whatever ' _torture_ ' that Nightwing specimen applied on you, it clearly wasn't worth jeopardizing your employment with me. You probably realized that too when you made the choice to submit to his threats, and now, that choice of yours is going to result in certain consequences."

Joey gulped hard at that statement of Blockbuster's, conceiving that the punishment on the part of his Boss was inevitable. At this point, the prospect of staying in the safety of the BPD's holding cell instead no longer seemed to him such a bad alternative.

"S-sir, please..." the poor man continued pleading with the kingpin. "You know I didn't spill anything important to that vigilante on you!"

"That's because you didn't possess this kind of information in the first place," the oversized crime lord brushed his coaxing aside. "Mr. McIntyre, there's a reason why I prefer to keep lower level menials like you in the dark and interact with you only through the assistance of my closest and most trusted agents. I already told you that I don't expect loyalty from people whose trustworthiness I find questionable. At the same time, I don't put my trust in such people either."

Then Blockbuster leaned back in his chair again, crossing his huge arms on his broad chest.

"In fact, Mr. McIntyre, I don't even hold any grudge against you for trying to sell me out to that vigilante," he proceeded. "Like I already said, you're nothing but another unlucky victim of your own limited intelligence. You're simply incapable of properly assessing a situation and calculating your risks when it comes to being driven into a corner. Unfortunately, in your case, lack of intellect cannot be considered a justification. It cannot even be considered a mitigating factor. No, Mr. McIntyre, what you did, regardless of the circumstances, is nothing but a breach of the covenant that you had to me and to my cartel. I know that when you first approached my men asking them to let you become a member of our network you justified your motivation by willing to make life better for your family. That's a noble aspiration, and you've been given everything to be able to deliver on it: the money, the assistance, the protection... However, the moment you decided to cooperate with that vigilante, you willfully gave up all those privileges. You, Mr. McIntyre, have consciously violated your obligation, and now, that violation of yours will have to be dealt with accordingly."

With every next pronouncement made by his Boss Joey kept coming to the terrifying understanding that there was no eluding Blockbuster's wrath for him. And what frustrated him worst about it was the fact that he had no one else to blame for it but himself. He would have loved to blame everything just on that Nightwing freak whose interference in their gang's operation had caused this whole chain reaction of unfortunate events. But after everything he had seen and heard over the past few hours, he realized that the actual catalyst of the predicament he now found himself in was himself with his decision to become a member of Blockbuster's mob. He should have never aligned himself with these scumbags and he should have never trusted them in the first place. These people, if it was even the right way to call them, played by the rules of the animal kingdom, and Joey was a fool to think he could live up to the same standards. But now that his Boss touched upon the theme of his family, Joey suddenly began to consider his own well-being a secondary concern here. If something was going to happen to him at the hands of Blockbuster, what would happen to his family? What was to become of his wife and daughter?

Now having some completely different priorities in mind, Joey addressed himself to his Boss again,

"What are you going to do to me?" he asked, the former agitation in his voice giving place to concern about the impact that would be made on his family.

The oversized crime lord retained emotionless facial expression behind his innate grimace of sinister deformity.

"Mr. McIntyre, before I tell you what I'm going to do to you, I need you to understand _why_ I'm going to do what I'm going to do," the kingpin said arrogantly and then rose from his armchair to approach the large window behind him.

After that, the head of the crime syndicate spent a couple of seconds silently studying the view of the city beneath that he himself had usurped, his massive hands locked behind his back in a thinking pose. Then he resumed his tirade, his back still turned to Joey,

"It may come as a shock to you, Mr. McIntyre, but I haven't always been the man of intelligence that I am today. For a long while, I used to be an ordinary man with ordinary level of intellect. I'd like to believe that my mental capacity was still higher that that of most average people, but in the long run, it made little difference. In addition to this, I lacked my today's physical stature and strength. So whenever I needed to implement some of my schemes that would often require the use of both these qualities, I used deception as a means to an end. I manipulated other less cunning and intelligent people into doing all the dirty work for me, lured them into my clever traps and then induced them into being my own puppets. And among those people misled by me was my own brother..."

Upon mentioning his brother, the hulking crime lord sighed and slightly inclined his head as if it really was a very sore subject to him. Joey found it surprising to see such seemingly imperturbable brutish man display signs of human emotions. Apparently, soft spots were something no living being, no matter how toughened or cruel-hearted, could completely alienate from.

"My brother used to be one the most talented, the most brilliant chemists this world has ever known," Blockbuster continued with his narration. "Unlike me, his superior intelligence next to the rest of the masses was unquestionable. I guess part of me had always been jealous of him because of that. However, like many other brilliant men, my brother had an obsession. He was fixated on the idea of making himself bigger, stronger, more durable and powerful. For many years he'd been desperately trying to create a chemical formula that would fill him with strength beyond what any ordinary man could know. And for that purport, he was using his own body as a test subject. Of course, with a mind as bright as his, it was only a matter of time before his experiments achieved their success. But, unfortunately, that success came to him along with certain side-effects..."

On that note, the oversized kingpin took a deep breath as if stifling some serious emotional pain within him.

"My brother did manage to become big and strong just as he desired, but his brilliant mind was gone," he went on, his deep menacing voice having grown solemn. "Not only he lost all his genius – he became little more intelligent than an irrational animal. It pained me to see how my own flesh and blood and one of the brightest minds I had ever known was reduced to nothing but a retarded brute. But at the same time, the part of me which had always envied his superior intellect made me see an opportunity in the tragedy that had happened to him. Which is why I did something that I don't feel very proud of today – I took advantage of my brother's debilitated state of mind."

Then re turned around, his gander meeting with Joey's again. To his further surprise, the former bank guard saw how the eyes of his bestial looking Boss moistened as if he was on the verge of bursting into tears.

"Yes, Mr. McIntyre, you heard me just right – I fed off my own brother," the crime lord declared in his still roaring, but this time also trembling voice. "I intentionally turned him into an antithesis of everything he used to be – an imbecile thug, a mindless musclehead who would do my every bidding just because he was simply too stupid to disobey me! I used him as a front so he could absorb all the physical damage for me while I could focus on elaborating my grand schemes and enjoying my own personal gain from them."

Blockbuster then clenched both his big hands into fists as if suppressing some serious burst of outrage rising within him.

"And you know what's the worst part of all this, Mr. McIntyre?" he put a rhetorical question to his employee. "I actually enjoyed it! I was happy to finally become the smarter of the two Desmond brothers. I liked being the brain of our duo while my once brilliant brother was nothing more than a dumb muscle led by me on a leash. Apparently, that's what the deadly sin of envy can do to a person..."

The sturdy man then inhaled deeply again as if trying to calm himself and turned back to face the window behind him, once more locking his hands behind his back.

"However, I was eventually punished for that sin of mine," Blockbuster continued in his former tempered tone. "You see, as a man of intelligence, I prefer not to believe in things like destiny, fate or divine judgment. Nonetheless, I cannot come up with another rational explanation for the chain of events I had gone through afterwards. First, it was my brother who got caught during one of the tasks I had assigned to him and then ended up in prison. I tried to get him out, but I didn't have my today's influence and connections at that time, so all my efforts came out fruitless. Instead, it was somebody else more powerful than me who managed to do this, only to take advantage of him just like I did before. My brother was recruited for some secret mercenary squad that was also interested in exploiting his enhanced strength and durability. However, those people didn't realize that without my guidance, he was nothing more than an uncontrollable demented berserk. So it wasn't long before my brother got himself killed during one of that squad's missions..."

Joey heard how Blockbuster sobbed after that monologue as if the overfilling sorrow had finally got the better of him. There seemed that this monster of a man really mourned for his brother now, even though he didn't appear to have valued their sibling connection much while the former was still alive.

"Unfortunately, this run of bad luck for me didn't stop with my brother's death," Blockbuster continued. "After he passed away, I tried to handle our family business all by myself, naively believing that I could well go without his physical prowess to assist me. That delusion got me into one tragic accident during which I was infected with some rare form of virus that confined me to a hospital bed. The virus was beyond what modern medicine knew how to cure, so all the doctors I kept hiring to help me just lifted their hands in dismay. I was slowly dying and no one could do a damn thing about it. But that was until one of those so-called medical practitioners came to me and offered me to be treated with some experimental steroids. Being desperate and having no alternatives, I accepted that offer without thinking it over much. However, if I had known in advance that those steroids were developed on the basis of the very same formula that my brother had created before, I might have well given that idea a second thought..."

Again, Blockbuster clenched his fists tightly as if having arrived at another piece of memory that vexed him greatly.

"The steroids did their work – they cured me of the virus and restored me to full health," the oversized kingpin went on. "Moreover, they also increased my strength and stamina just like the chemical composition my brother was the author of. Only unlike his invention, the steroids applied on me allowed me to retain my human appearance, making me turn into a hulking, brutish stalwart only occasionally, when I would become too irritated or enraged. However, that was only a temporary effect. The formula of the steroids was incomplete and some of its aftereffects began to show only after a period of time. At first, I began to lose control over my transformations, starting to turn into a deformed brute more and more often until I completely forgot how to retrieve my human guise. Then, my intellect started becoming reduced just like it was with my brother. That was when I fathomed the cruel irony of my penance: the tables were turned on me this time, and I was about to suffer the exact same fate that my brother suffered before."

Blockbuster turned away from the window again to face Joey, his hands still balled into fists and a new-born ember of white-hot rage burning in his evil eyes now.

"From then on, I had been forced to endure everything I had made my brother go through when I was using his mental state to my advantage," the crime Boss proceeded, almost fuming with rampage now. "Pain... humiliation... disrespect... anger... despair... Now _I_ became the one who was an easy target for others to manipulate, sell out and make a fool of. Even despite all my physical strength, I've never felt weaker in my entire life. Only unlike my brother, I didn't have anyone to guide me through this hell. So it took me even less time to end up in prison just like he did before."

The gargantuan man kept getting more and more furious with every next phrase he voiced until he couldn't contain his rage anymore and just let it all out, violently slamming his massive fist into one of the drawer units standing near his desk. The drawer unit burst into pieces from the crushing force of the blow with all the documents contained in it flying asunder as if detonated from within, making all Blockbuster's henchmen in the room stagger back apace with fear. Joey barely managed to keep himself in his chair as well, almost paralyzed with shock from the display of power his Boss had demonstrated. For a few moments after that, breathless silence had ensued in the office as everyone present in it were dead to make a move or sound that could potentially further provoke the wrathful crime lord standing in front of them. Blockbuster, on the other hand, appeared to have started feeling a bit better after blowing off some steam like that, and then proceeded with his speech, his manner now measured and composed again.

"However, there was one substantial difference between my mental feebleness and the one of my brother's," Blockbuster went on, casually adjusting the sleeves of his suit after the outburst he'd had. "Unlike him, the degradation of my intellect didn't strip me of the desire to try to elevate above my condition. Despite lacking the mental capacities to solve my problem, I never stopped looking for ways to do so. So, at some point, my bad karma finally showed me some mercy. After having been taught a lesson for the way I treated my brother, I was offered a second chance – a chance at redemption, at righting my wrongs and having my debilitated intellect not only restored, but even increased well above my brother's level in his best days. This was a chance I simply couldn't help taking, but... it was also a chance that came to me at a very... high price..."

Upon that phrase, the kingpin pensively put his right hand over his heart. Joey noticed that inadvertent gesture as well, but didn't get what it meant.

"I'm still not sure if I'll ever be able to pay that price back," Blockbuster declared expressively, "But I'm convinced that that price was worth it, because it made me the very man that I am today – a man of superior intellect, a mastermind whose brilliance overmatches that of any trivial crime lord from one of the neighboring towns, and, last but not least, a man that has a vision for Blüdhaven and can finally make something beautiful out of this city's ugliness."

Blockbuster seemed to have switched from self-reproach to self-admiration instead, now focusing only on the positive aspects of his tragic biography. For a moment, Joey even forgot why this whole story had been brought up by him in the first place, but then his Boss reminded him of it again.

"However, after everything I endured and everything I sacrificed to have my intellect restored to me, I made myself a promise – an oath, if you will," the kingpin went on, "I swore I would never ever feel as weak again as I did back when I was deprived of my rational mind. Alas, keeping that promise turned out to be more difficult than I imagined, as some situations still manage to stir these painful memories in my mind, making me relive them again - situations like the one involving you, Mr. McIntyre."

After hearing that upbraiding statement, Joey once again felt the cold, stony stare of his Boss penetrate him almost to the depth of his internal organs. Although he was no longer as scared of Blockbuster as at the very beginning of this meeting, there was still something so animalistic and diabolical in the latter's eyes that just couldn't help but give the creeps.

"You see, Mr. McIntyre, when it comes to dealing with traitors, most of my colleagues in our line of work usually resort to punitive measures merely to cover their own tracks and prevent further leakage of information," Blockbuster said. "Others punish traitors only for the sake of punishing, just to nurse their own wounded egos or to make an example out of the ones responsible so that the rest of their employees would heed that experience for the future. Let me assure you, though, that my motivation in this matter isn't based on any of the afore-named grounds. You see, as a head of a branched business network, I have to make a lot of decisions on a daily basis; a lot of very important decisions that have a direct impact on the entire city of Blüdhaven and everyone living in it. That includes decisions regarding the recruitment of new people into my cartel. Believe it or not, Mr. McIntyre, but the ultimate decision to have you added to our ranks was also made by me. That's because there's no one else that has more superior intellect and thus can exercise more sound judgment. However, after what you did, I can't help but start questioning the reasonability of my own decision. The fact that I put my money on someone who turned out to be not worth the investment makes my judgment seem... inconsistent. Which, in its turn, undermines the superiority of my intellect. And that, Mr. McIntyre, is something I cannot possibly tolerate to happen..."

On that note, Blockbuster marched back to his desk and took his seat again, his harsh glance still fixed on Joey.

"I want you to understand, Mr. McIntyre, that I'm not looking to penalize you just to address some reputational or other indirect risks of mine," the oversized crime lord declared in some patronizing tone, "I'm not interested in ruining other people's lives only to have some consequential losses compensated to me. But the instant you betrayed me in favor of that vigilante, you discredited my own choice. You insulted my intelligence and thus made it personal with me! Which is why, Mr. McIntyre, I have no other choice but to take care of this situation on a personal level."

Joey felt another rush of stinging chill run down his spine. It was official now: he was doomed. His Boss had just confirmed to him that they had a problem, and if everything Joey had witnessed up until now was any indication, then there was only one way a man like Blockbuster could handle such problem. But there was more at stake in this for Joey than just his own health and life. He had a family waiting for him at home, and if something happened to him, the biggest weight of pain and suffering would fall not on him, but on his family members. And as long as there was a single heartbeat or a single breath left in him, he knew he had to keep trying to do something about this.

"Mr. Desmond," Joey implored, trying to bring as much sincerity and regret into his every word as possible, "I know I screwed up... big time... And I already told how sorry I am for that. I really am! But, please, I'm begging you... don't take away my life! I'm not asking this just for myself! I have a family to take care of! Without me, they're lost! Please, sir..."

Blockbuster only scoffed derisively at Joey's pleadings.

"Funny you should mention your family exactly now, Mr. McIntyre," the kingpin made a cryptic remark, "Because I was just about to touch upon this subject as well."

With that, he shifted his sight to the thug named Ricky.

"Ricky, would you be so kind?" he asked him.

"Of course, sir," the loyal henchman replied meekly and took out a mobile phone out of his suit's pocket.

Then he started dialing up some number on it. Joey began wonderingly glimpsing now at Blockbuster and now at Ricky in an attempt to understand what this whole thing was all about. But it was only until Ricky finally brought his phone to ear and told somebody on the other end of the line,

"Pass the phone to her."

Thereupon, the thug approached the former bank guard and handed him his phone. Joey hesitatingly took it in his shaking hand, still not fully understanding what was going on and who was this 'her' that Ricky had referred to. But once he pressed the phone against his ear and heard the voice coming from it, everything became painfully evident in one solitary, horrific moment.

" _J-Joey! Joey, what's going on?"_ a scared, tear-strained feminine voice rang from the earpiece. _"Th-these people... they stormed into our apartment... bound us... said it was all because of you! J-Joey, please tell me what happened!"_

Once Joey heard that, his orbs widened in the most inimitable upsurge of shock and fright. The voice on the other end of the line was more than familiar to him because it belonged to no one else but his very wife, Sara. The realization rendered Joey speechless for a moment as the stupefying feeling of dismay seemed to have taken the whole air out of his lungs. His Boss didn't lie when he said he was going to settle their dispute on a personal level. But this... breaking into his house and taking his wife and daughter hostage because of their own personal quarrel – that was way out of line... Slowly, the feeling of shock within the former security guard began to get replaced with vehement anger and rage. Now, all the fears he had suffered up until this instant had retreated into the background, leaving him to do only with what he found was really important to him right now – his family. This helped Joey retrieve his gift of gab and finally reply to his wife,

"Sara, Sara can you hear me?" he hurriedly barked out into the phone. "Are you alright? Don't worry, everything's gonna be fine! You hear me?! I won't let anything..."

However, before he was able to finish that line of his, Ricky unceremoniously took the phone away from Joey's grip. Livid now, the former bank guard fearlessly lashed at the mobster, looking to get the communication device back.

"Rrrrrr, give it back you bastard!" Joey shouted at the henchman, already taking a swing at him with his right fist.

The thug effortlessly blocked Joey's attack with his forearm and then expertly retaliated by jabbing the former security guard right into the nose, causing him to collapse to the ground face first. Blockbuster watched that scene with a flat and uninterested expression on his ugly face, his chin resting on his huge fist.

"Mr. McIntyre, I strongly advise you against trying to put up this pitiful resistance in your very... precarious position," the oversized crime lord remarked dryly.

Joey half-rose from the floor and wiped the blood from under his nose. Then he valiantly dashed to his Boss's desk and grabbed him by the lapels of his suit from across the table.

"You fucking son of a bitch!" he bellowed at Blüdhaven's biggest mobster, his former trepidation before him gone completely. "How dare you bring my family into this?"

All henchmen in the room almost synchronically reached for their guns to start shooting at their leader's assailant, but Blockbuster halted them with a serene gesture of his huge hand.

"I didn't bring your family into this, Mr. McIntyre – you did," he replied calmly and imperturbably, not even trying to get out of the man's grip. "But you needn't worry about them. As long as you're going to do exactly as instructed, your family will remain unharmed."

"I'll do anything you say, just leave my family out of it!" Joey snarled, still ravenously digging with all his fingers into the fabric of his Boss's expensive suit.

Blockbuster smiled sardonically at his employee's ardency, not intimidated in the slightest.

"I appreciate your collaborative approach, Mr. McIntyre," he responded coldly. "Just keep in mind one thing..."

On that phrase, the hulking man sharply rose from his chair and brutally flung at Joey with his enormous arm, sending him flying a good twelve feet away from his desk like some troublesome fly. The former bank guard landed on the opposite end of the office with a loud wallop and continued to lie there motionless, clearly having been knocked out cold. When he didn't show any signs of consciousness for another few seconds, Blockbuster superciliously finished his previous oration,

"...You don't get to lay down any conditions when you speak to a man whose intelligence surpasses yours hundredfold."

After this pretentious tirade, the kingpin straightened the lapels of his suit Joey had just crumpled with his hands and addressed himself to his top henchman,

"Ricky, please have this pathetic pile of human garbage escorted from here," he told him disparagingly. "And make sure everything goes according to the plan."

"As you say, sir," the thug returned as always obediently and gave a gesture to the other two lugs.

The two bigger henchmen quickly approached Joey's senseless husk and lifted it from the ground by the armpits like a dead weight to start dragging him to the exit from the office. Ricky was already about to follow them when his Boss stopped him in his tracks by calling him again,

"Ricky, before you leave, I have one more question for you."

"What is it, sir?" the loyal henchman immediately turned around to his employer.

"What about the recording of the conversation between that Nightwing and another female vigilante at the City-Dock Commercial?" he asked. "Have you already been able to study it?"

"We're working on it, sir," Ricky blurted out as if already prepared for this kind of question. "Unfortunately, almost everyone who was present at the City-Dock Commercial during that confrontation got their eavesdropping devices damaged as a result of the beating delivered to them by those vigilantes. There was only one device left intact but the quality of what it was able to record leaves much to be desired. However, we're still trying to decipher the details of the conversation. For instance, we've already been able to disarticulate that the female vigilante referred to than Nightwing by calling him 'Dick'."

Blockbuster knitted his bushy eyebrows together at the piece of information delivered by his trusted employee and took thought.

"Hmm, 'Dick' you say?" he asked as if musing aloud. "As in short for 'Richard'? Interesting... But not very useful, unfortunately."

Ricky couldn't help but pick on the note of discontent in his Boss's voice, which made him drop his eyes with compunction.

"I know, sir, and I agree with you," he admitted ashamedly. "But we're working on it. We just need some more time to decode the transcript."

In response, Blockbuster just turned his back to his henchman and approached the large window behind his desk again.

"It's okay, Ricky, I understand," he replied in a surprisingly soft-shelled tone while peering into the urban landscapes beneath. "Nonetheless, I have to strongly urge you to intensify your work and keep me updated on its progress. I'm really looking forward to finding out who this newly-emerged hero of Blüdhaven really is..."


	4. Chapter 4: With Good Intentions

**Author's note** : _A belated Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to everyone! Here's my little gift to you. As always, for now I'm uploading only the first part of the chapter focusing on the events of the past so you can get something to snack on before I finish the complete installment. Traditionally, I urge everyone to read and, whenever possible, provide feedback in any form that's convenient for you. This is really important for the progress of this story and for making 'Nightwing Extreme' as awesome as possible._

 _Thank you for your attention and now, onward with 'Nightwing Extreme',_

* * *

 **Chapter 4: With Good Intentions**

 _ **Gotham City – 2 years ago**_

Standing on the rooftop of the Biltworth Hotel, Dick solemnly peered into the vista of the Gotham's cityscapes sprawling beneath. Thousands of dazzling yellow lights shining at him through the windows of the neighboring buildings made him think about how many people there were actually living in this city that he protected. Men, women, children – each one having his or her own unique story to tell, his of her unique life to live and his or her own unique place in this world to fill. Millions of worlds within a single world and millions of lives within a single life... And right now, all these countless lives were all simultaneously moving in various directions. Some were moving a little faster than the others, some a little slower... Some were moving in the right direction, some could well be moving in the wrong one... But the bottom-line was that of all these lives were in a state of constant motion, evolving and developing every second of their existence. Dick's life was supposed to be constantly moving the exact same way, but, for some reason, lately the young man had been having the unpleasant feeling that his life was standing pat instead. This feeling was hard to explain, but every time he would put on the mantle and the mask of Robin the Boy Wonder, he always had the impression as if the life he was trying to live as Dick Grayson just turned frozen still. Of course, the implications of leading a double life one of which was the life of a vigilante had always been crystal clear to him. He fully understood that being a crime-fighter would always stand prior to any of his other activities and that his duty to Gotham and to its citizens would always have the best of any of his personal ambitions and aspirations. Moreover, he didn't actually mind that much. He had always enjoyed being a vigilante and he had always valued the importance of the role he played for protection of his city. He knew that no matter what happened, first and foremost, he would always be a crime-fighter.

But a crime-fighter wasn't _all_ that he was.

Six years ago when Dick became the Boy Wonder, he honestly believed that that milestone in his life was the absolute sky-limit of anything he could've ever dreamed of. After losing his entire family and the only place he could call a home, becoming a sidekick of the legendary Dark Knight in his crusade against crime definitely felt like the best thing that could ever happen to him. However, years spent in a cape and a mask had taught the young Dick Grayson that the life of a vigilante wasn't just all fun and games that he had naively imagined it to be at first. This was a very dark and dangerous path full of pain, anger, bitterness and tragedy along its way. Through all the time of being Robin, Dick had seen things which he now could only wish he'd never seen at all. He had witnessed the lows humanity could sink to the likes of which he could have never imagined in his worst nightmare. He had beheld chaos, lunacy, despair, terror and violence beyond any limits of his comprehension. But none of that ever made him want to stop and quit being a vigilante. If anything, it made him realize how important was what he was doing for his city and how vital it was to continue protecting the citizens of Gotham from all the threats lurking in its streets under the cloak of night. But it also made him realize something more. It made him realize that he couldn't let his job of a crime-fighter define his life as Dick Grayson. He couldn't let that darkness he faced on a daily basis infiltrate his heart and consume him completely. And for that, he had to be more than just a crime-fighter. He had to be a human being - a normal human being living a normal day-to-day life.

Today, six years later, Dick could tell that he truly managed to make a lot of things about his life take a change towards normal. Despite the hectic and sometimes even crazy pace of his job as a vigilante, he was still able to find the time and effort to graduate from high school, get a prestigious college degree and even get himself a girlfriend. For someone whose very life was at risk practically every day, that was probably as close to normal as one could possibly get. However, not everything that Dick had been trying to change about his life all along had turned out just as successful. Among those things was the way he was being treated by his mentor and partner in crime-fighting, Bruce Wayne. Although the years of working side-by-side with this man as part of the famous Dynamic Duo were supposed to teach Bruce to recognize Dick as a grown adult and a reliable independent hero, the former circus acrobat hadn't been getting much of that feeling from him. Instead, Dick felt as if even after six years spent together, Bruce was still regarding him as the very same emotionally traumatized 12-year old orphan boy he adopted out of pity almost ten years ago. But Dick knew for a fact that he wasn't that person anymore. He had already been through much since that time. He had learned much since that time. He had learned how to cope with his fears and insecurities and how to overcome them. He had learned how to trust people again and how to gain their trust in return. He had learned how to make his own decisions and take responsibility for them. Whatever person he used to be when he put on the Robin suit for the very first time, he had already changed since then. He had matured from a boy into a man, and not just physically, but mentally as well. However, that change in him appeared to have eluded his dark mentor.

It wasn't that Dick was trying to question Bruce's authority and leadership over him. He realized that Batman was arguably one of the greatest heroes this whole world had ever known and most probably would ever know. He understood that Bruce had started training to be a vigilante long before Dick was even born and that Dick would probably never become as experienced and skillful at this as his mentor was. But he never felt any jealousy or envy toward Bruce in that regard. He respected the hell out of him both as a person and as a crime-fighter and he was ready to accept that the Dark Knight would always be viewed as the greater hero of the two of them. However, what Dick wasn't ready to accept was not getting any of that respect in return. Even though he might not have been a match for Bruce, he was still his protégé. Therefore, if Batman was to be considered the best, then it meant that Dick had learned from the best and for that alone already deserved some credit. But, for some unexplainable reason, his dark mentor wasn't displaying much eagerness to give him one yet. Despite Dick having proven on numerous occasions that he could exercise sound judgment beyond his years and work efficiently all by himself, Bruce still kept on bossing him around like a child as if without his guidance Dick was completely helpless. From time to time, Dick even felt as if Bruce didn't want him to become a grown independent man at all and was only interested in him always remaining the Boy Wonder – his loyal sidekick that would only meekly follow his lead and be happy with that. And tonight seemed like another good example of this unpleasant tendency...

What had started as one of the most important and memorable nights in the life of Dick Grayson was now about to end up in another crime-fighting mission he'd been summoned to by his preceptor. Yet again, Dick never had any illusions as to the importance of what he was doing as Robin and how it outweighed the importance of anything else in his life. But graduation from college was one-of-a-lifetime event. It wasn't something that could be postponed, rescheduled or repeated. It was happening right here and right now, and if Dick couldn't be a part of it here and now, then it meant he couldn't be a part of it ever again. Because of that, he was unable to understand why for one solitary night in his entire life Bruce couldn't just cut him some slack and let him enjoy such a unique moment. Dick suspected that Bruce simply wasn't taking this whole college degree thing very seriously, probably considering it just another stupid youthful caprice of his former legal ward. But to Dick, it was something much more personal and significant. He really wished to be working in the law sphere and maybe even build a career as an attorney or advocate. He wanted to establish himself as more than just a tough guy capable of beating up criminals at nights. He wanted to be able to help people, but not just outside the boundaries of law as he was doing as Robin. He wanted to be able to do so without a cape and a mask concealing his identity - thus, as only Dick Grayson could.

Now, with the graduation ceremony left a good few dozen floors below and his hand-tailored white tuxedo suit with a bowtie replaced with a yellow cape, a red tunic with an "R" symbol on it, as well as a pair of green gloves, briefs and boots and a black domino mask, Dick found himself standing not just on the verge of the Biltworth Hotel's roof, but on the verge of the two of his lives: the one as Robin the Boy Wonder, a vigilante secretly fighting crime at nights alongside its prominent protector Batman, and the other as Dick Grayson, a fresh graduate from the Law Faculty of Gotham State University who just got his diploma and right now deserved to have some quality leisure time for all the hard work in had funneled into getting it. Unfortunately, he already knew which life he was going to choose this time, just as any other time...

This sad realization made the young vigilante switch his gander from the urban landscapes around him to his own uniform he was wearing now. Dick couldn't tell why, but lately he had developed some strong feeling of dislike toward it. When Bruce designed that costume for him about six years ago, he deliberately made it resemble his former circus unitard. Since Dick was feeling responsible for his parents' death at that time, he thought that carrying on their symbol in such a way would help him atone for his guilt and gain some inner peace. However, much had already changed since that time. After all the years of stopping dangerous criminals and saving people's lives, Dick managed to finally forgive himself and disburden his soul off the heavy load it used to carry. He realized that his folks would have never blamed him for the tragedy to have happened on that frightful night and that they would have most definitely wanted him to move on with his life. Whatever debt he had ever owed to his family and to Haly's circus, he had already paid it in full by becoming one of the protectors of Gotham City. And as much as he valued his circus heritage and wanted to pay respect to his deceased parents, at some point he just figured out that he didn't need to constantly dress as a circus acrobat for that. Even though his uniform had already undergone more than a few modifications since the day he put it on for the very first time so it could suit the changes in his physicality, now it still no longer reflected the kind of man he had grown into. Dick felt as if some changes had to be introduced into his guise to accommodate the changes in his mindset and personality. However, when he started to dwell on this, he quickly arrived at the conclusion that if he was really looking to make a change about himself, the way his costume looked had to be the least of his concerns.

Sighing to himself at the squall of pessimistic thoughts rushing into his mind, Dick finally took out his Grapnel Gun and fired it at the ledge of the nearest skyscraper. Then, as the launched cable line carried him to where the hook had adhered to, he sensed how the building of the Biltworth Hotel was quickly becoming left farther and farther behind him. Dick's graduation night was officially over and it was over for good. It was, indeed, disappointing to realize that, even though there was most likely nothing extraordinary going to take place at that party during his absence. Yet, this wasn't about extraordinariness or missed fun to him. That was supposed to be _his_ night, _his_ moment of glory, but he was denied his chance to enjoy it completely. On top of that, tomorrow, another awkward conversation with Barbara awaited him where he had to come up with another ingenious explanation on why he had walked out on her in the middle of his own celebration. This was probably the part that was stressing him out the worst about this whole situation. Dick realized that Barbara had long since started suspecting something because of his frequent 'escapes' from their dates so it wouldn't be too long before she would begin to ask him questions. He wasn't sure how much longer he was going to be able to keep that masquerade with her but at least he still hoped he would be able to tell her the whole truth before she ultimately uncovered it all on her own.

Soon the young vigilante forced all the intrusive thoughts out of his mind and fixated on the task at hand. He was going on a mission right now, which meant that he had to stay focused. Personal issues or not, but Dick had just reminded himself that, first and foremost, he was a crime-fighter. He was taking his job as Robin very seriously and wanted to be productive at it. And if that meant temporarily shutting all his feelings and emotions out, then this was a sacrifice he was more than ready to make. So the Boy Wonder continued making his way to his destination point, leaping from building to building with the help of his Grapnel Gun.

The Gotham Space Museum or 'Goth Space' as they called it loosely sometimes was located quite far away from the Biltworth Hotel. Had Dick known in advance that his graduation night would have ended up in another crime investigation he would have probably taken his motorcycle with him as well. But since he had hoped to the utmost that tonight was going to be an exception in that regard, he was now forced to cover the long distance in a less expedite and more excruciating manner. Why Bruce had summoned him specifically to this location, though, was a different matter to ponder. Considering it was a museum specializing in collecting various types of space technological achievements, Dick could hardly wrap his head around the idea of what this place could possibly have to do with Joker or his henchmen. However, he had no more reason to doubt Bruce's detective instinct than he had a reason to doubt his own self. This man didn't get nicknamed 'the world's greatest detective' for nothing, so whenever he found a lead, there had to be something valid behind it.

After a while, Dick finally reached the rooftop of Goth Space building. Whenever he and Batman arranged to meet somewhere in Gotham, it usually was on summits of various construction as they offered good vantage points and also kept them safe from the prying eyes of anyone who could be present in the streets at that time. Therefore, Dick new his dark mentor had to be waiting for him somewhere close by. He quickly ranged his sight over the roof's surface and then spotted a painfully familiar dark silhouette sitting crouched on its distant edge, its back turned to Dick. The contours of the broad-shouldered figure were nearly merging with the surrounding night gloom, but the distinctive outlines of a long black cape wavering in the wind and a pair of pointed bat-like ears could still be discerned if wanted. The discovery sent some unpleasant chilling sensation down the young vigilante's spine. It was astonishing how even after almost ten years of living together with this man and very often willing to treat him as his own father, Dick still couldn't get rid of some unexplainable sense of trepidation in his mere presence. Despite knowing him so well for so long, Dick just couldn't help always feeling that very strange and even scary vibe constantly emanate from Bruce as if the energy of darkness itself was surrounding him in some kind of force field. Bruce Wayne, indeed, had a lot in common with that intimidating image of Batman that he himself had created and eventually embodied: stern, harsh, intense, always focused and hardly ever smiling or even laughing. Perhaps, that was the reason why the criminals of Gotham City and beyond were so much afraid of the legendary Dark Knight. This man was a personification of pure intimidation, and not just because of his actions, but because of this unique dark aura he possessed.

Slowly, Dick began to approach the dark figure sitting on the edge of the roof, his every step as quiet and light as possible. Even though he knew that trying to slip undetected past such a master of stealth as Batman was a guaranteed lost cause, the former circus acrobat still couldn't resist the burning urge to attempt this. By the time he made halfway across the rooftop, the silhouette in front of him hadn't stirred one bit. For a moment, Dick was almost ready to naively believe that this time he would manage to catch his dark mentor by surprise. But just as he was about to start making the rest of his way to the supposedly unsuspecting Bruce, a deep masculine voice boomed at him from afore, stopping him in his tracks.

"You're late," an audible note of reproach was heard in the tone of his dark mentor.

Dick cursed at himself inwardly. Bruce must have detected his presence the very instant he set his foot on this roof and to hope that he would be able to sneak past the great Dark Knight was as foolish as it was pointless. But what vexed the young vigilante worse than his unsuccessful attempt to outsmart his mentor was the acrid rebuke made by the latter. Not only did Bruce unceremoniously pull Dick right out his graduation party but he even had the audacity to criticize him for his 'punctuality'. If anything, Bruce should have been happy that Dick had been able to just up and ditch both his graduation and his girlfriend and get here so fast. Once again, the Boy Wonder felt being pushed around like a tiny little kid which he was not anymore and which he most certainly didn't wish to be treated as anymore.

"Well excuse me for having a life," Robin retorted dryly, not willing to go down without at least making his point.

Batman left his sidekick's comment without a reply, continuing to sit crouched and staring ahead without even looking at him. Apparently, he didn't even consider this issue to be worth any debate and decided to end it no later than it started. Just like in any other argument between the two of them, the final word always stayed with Bruce even if he didn't care to spell it out. Dick hated that things had to be this way, but could do little about it, especially right now. As he had already caught himself thinking before, he was on a mission now, which meant that he couldn't let his emotions distract him. So the young crime-fighter decided to delay the dispute until better days and concentrate on what was important now.

When the silence between him and Bruce began to drag on, Dick decided to approach the verge of the roof as well to see what his dark mentor was watching so closely from it. However, doing that failed to enlighten the former circus acrobat in that respect. Everything he was able to descry from that viewpoint were only empty night streets full of ordinary dwelling houses, plain and monotonous, with absolutely nothing special or suspicious about them. There was also a warehouse confronting the museum, but it appeared to be closed, with nothing eye-catching taking place around it and no strange people to be seen hanging outside of it. Why any part of this area was supposed to be of any importance to their mission here was beyond Dick, so once he put up with the idea that he would not be able to unravel this mystery on his own, he decided to form a direct question to Bruce.

"So... Why exactly are we here?" he asked.

The Dark Knight continued to gravely stare ahead, still not even looking back at Robin.

"One of the local street-punks working for the Joker spilled to me that his gang would be here tonight," he returned in his always all-business and stolid manner.

Dick whimsically raised his eyebrow in display of amazement at the very odd lead Bruce had just shared with him. His emotion remained securely concealed by his mask, though, but even if it hadn't been for it, his interlocutor was still not even looking his way to see his reaction.

"No offense to you or to your choice of informer, but what kind of interest can Joker or his goons possibly have in some space technology museum?" he skeptically put another question to Batman.

Before replying to him, Bruce reached for his utility belt to take out his night binoculars, still seeming to be more interested in what was transpiring beneath than in maintaining conversation with Dick.

"I think Joker is not so much interested in the museum itself as he is in what is going to be presented there," Batman responded imperturbably then. "Goth Space is holding an exhibition tomorrow where some brand new pieces of militarized equipment are going to be displayed. And the Joker is probably looking to get his hands on one of those pieces."

As Bruce revealed all those details to Dick, the fragments of the jigsaw puzzle in the young vigilante's head gradually began to commingle into a whole picture. Of course, with someone like his dark mentor, he shouldn't have expected anything less than the most in-depth study of every syllable of this matter. However, some questions still remained.

"But if the exhibition is taking place only tomorrow, why is Joker hitting the museum already tonight?" Robin asked.

Batman once again didn't hurry to honor Dick with a fast response, first holding his binoculars in front of his eyes and taking another look into the distance.

"Because it's not the museum he's hitting but that warehouse across the street," he answered after a few seconds of peering ahead, "This is where the showpieces for tomorrow's exhibition are being stored."

Now Dick was positive there were no more ambiguities left to him about this mission. How Bruce was able to obtain such kind of insights was something the Boy Wonder could never fully understand. However, he had long since got accustomed that his dark mentor had his own 'trick of the trade' that he would hardly ever disclose to him. So instead of trying to decipher the secret of Bruce's detective genius, the former circus acrobat decided to just follow his example and also observe the building of the warehouse with his own night binoculars.

As Robin swept his view over the warehouse's façade, he quickly noticed that there wasn't one solitary guard standing sentinel outside of it. It was strange that a place where some very serious and most likely very expensive militarized equipment was being stored hadn't been provided with more notable security. Perhaps, no one could even concede the idea that in a city like Gotham the local criminals would suddenly show interest in some technology exhibition, let alone, try to steal some of its showpieces. But then again, the thread of thoughts of such a psychotic criminal mastermind as the Joker who was supposed to be behind this was simply beyond ordinary people's understanding. Bruce appeared to be the only one who was capable of at least getting close to figuring out the true motives of this madman, but sometimes even he couldn't get close enough. That was what, among other things, made a villain like Joker so dangerous: the unpredictability of his deranged, yet somehow brilliant criminal mind.

For a long while, the area around the warehouse seemed all peaceful and quiet. At some point, Dick was even about to think that Bruce had pulled him out of his graduation party on a false alert. However, the very instant the Boy Wonder almost moved the binoculars away from his eyes, something else got within his field of vision. A truck suddenly drove over to the left side of the building and then parked right in front of its entrance. Then the door to the driver's cab opened and three men walked out of it: two tall, well-built lugs and the third one a skinny guy of medium height. All were very causally dressed and looked just the same, no signs of any crime affiliation visibly traceable in their appearance. Nonetheless, as soon as the three of them showed up, Bruce instantly declared,

"There they are."

At this announcement, Dick shifted his gaze from the binoculars in his hand to his dark mentor sitting crouched to the right of him. Although 99.9% of the time Bruce was right in all his suspicions, Dick was not ready to fully accept his deduction just yet.

"I don't see them wear any face paint or clown masks," Robin expressed his doubt, "What if they're not Joker's men?"

However, the disproof of Dick's presumption came in the very following second as one more figure then stepped out of the truck. The man to have walked out clearly had a more eye-catching fashion style than the three of his companions, wearing a bright purple suit with a long-tailed, padded-shoulder jacket, yellow shirt and striped purple pants. In addition to this flamboyant attire, he also had a pair of white gloves on his hands, black and white pointed-toe shoes, a green bowtie and a large pink lapel flower. The man's overall guise could seem comical and even funny, but that impression was quick to wear off upon the very first look into his nightmarish face: it was pinched and meager, with bleached white skin, a red-lipped mouth which corners were pulled so far into the back of the cheeks they created some unnatural semblance of a sick, sadistic smile, as well as a head of toxic-green curly hair. But the most flagrant habit of his was the eyes: they were large, evil and constantly wide open like that of a severally mentally unstable person, with small but no less terrifying pupils that seemed to penetrate your very soul if you looked directly into them. If anyone ever wondered how a physical embodiment of horror could look like, the answer was probably vested in this very person. His bloodcurdling appearance and the unspeakably brutal, maniacal atrocities that he'd been committing in Gotham and beyond for years already had turned him into one of the most feared villains of all times. He had many names: the Clown Prince of Crime, the Jester of Genocide, the Ace of Knaves... But to most people, he was known as simply 'the Joker'.

As Robin assured himself of the correctness of the lead Bruce had found, he couldn't help taking a quick glance at the latter to see his reaction. Dick instantly noticed how the corners of his dark mentor's mouth slightly cringed in what seemed to be a grimace of overfilling rage at the sight of his old enemy. It was unusual to see him break his nonchalance like this, but Dick could hardly blame him for that. He knew that Joker and Batman had quite a history together. The Dark Knight had made dozens if not hundreds of adversaries through the years of protecting Gotham and many other cities and towns, but this man he was watching now was undoubtedly his greatest, most bitter rival. Joker represented the completely antithesis of everything that Batman was and stood for, thus incarnating the true meaning of the word 'arch nemesis'. Every time the two of them clashed with each other, it was like matter and anti-matter coming into contact, which then always resulted in a combusting reaction. One could even call them 'the perfect foes' as they both matched each other so closely yet were never able to completely get the better of one another, with Batman repetitively putting the Joker behind bars and the Joker always finding a new way to escape and then re-start this vicious circle of rivalry between them over and over again.

But Joker was so much more than just another dangerous supervillain that Bruce was at swords' points with. Bruce had met plenty of formidable individuals through the time of wearing the Batman's cape and mask. He had had battles with super-powered meta-humans, professionally trained assassins, mutants, returned-to-life deadmen and even aliens. Many of them were mentally deranged like the Joker. Many of them were cruel, merciless and sadistic like the Joker, if not worse. Many of them even had special powers and abilities beyond anything the Joker could even dream of. Yet, none of them could match this sick, insane man in his unparalleled violence. The reason for that was because Joker was the only one of his kind who truly had no limits. This man was unhinged in the purest sense of this word. His disregard for human life was beyond apocryphal – he considered it to be nothing more than a joke, a reason to have a good laugh. And he would stop at nothing to get that laugh. However, it wasn't enough for the Joker just to have all this 'fun' for himself. He also wanted to prove to his sworn enemy, the Dark Knight, how mistaken the latter was in his desire to keep saving those useless, pathetic human lives. And to prove that point, the Joker had no solitary line he wasn't ready to cross. That's what made that man so dangerous: not the abominable appearance, not the inhumane and sadistic methods, not even the frantic yet cunning and clever mind... It was his barbaric ideology. Nothing but a sinister urge to assert something to somebody, notwithstanding the cost of all the innocent lives that would have to be paid for that...

"Alright, boys, lets get to work," the Joker told the two big lugs in his snuffling clown-like voice, then switched the attention to the third smaller guy, "As for you, Connor, all you gotta do is give us the high sign if you see anyone coming. Trust me when I tell you that this is the easiest hundred you'll ever make for one night."

The man whose name appeared to be Connor tensed visibly. It was hard not to feel uncomfortable around such dismal and weird individual as the Joker, especially when knowing who he actually was and what he was capable of.

"W-wait a minute guys," Connor asked with nervous stutter in his voice, still not fully certain if what he was doing now was a good idea, "Y-you still haven't told what exactly you will be doing."

In response to his question, the Joker took out his favorite folding knife and sharply approached his interlocutor.

"Uh-huh-huh," he menacingly waved the knife's blade inches away from Connor's face in a forbidding gesture, "Stick your nose in other people's business, and it might get cut off!"

Even though Connor realized that the Joker was just toying with him, seeing his knife flash right before his eyes made him gulp hard with alertness. This madman was so unpredictable you could never tell what he really had on his deranged mind. One second he could be making jokes as if being in a good mood and just having fun and the next one he could already be ripping your guts out. One couldn't take any chances with that lunatic so Connor preferred to keep all further questions to himself.

The Joker, witnessing the intimidation in Connor's eyes, grinned even wider than he already was. Then he placed his hand on the man's shoulder in a supposedly friendly gesture, which, however, seemed more like a prelude to another intimidating action.

"Connor, you can keep a secret, can you not?" he asked him rhetorically, then took out a hundred dollars banknote from his pocket and humiliatingly put it right into Connor's mouth. "Because if you can't, I'm afraid I will have to carve out a little smile on that grumpy silly face of yours."

On that phrase, the Joker pressed his knife's blade to the man's right cheek.

Connor who was both embarrassed and terrified in that moment could only widen his fearful eyes at the psychopathic supervillain holding a knife to his face. That silent pause lasted a couple more seconds until the Joker just sharply swung his head up and began to laugh. He was laughing loudly and hysterically, roaring with a cackle that sounded especially disturbing. Even the two of his thugs who should have been accustomed to this couldn't help but stiffen with uneasiness. It was hard enough dealing with their Boss's crazy attitude all the time, but right now his fit of frenzy could also draw the attention to what they were doing there and ruin their entire operation. But the Joker seemed to be careless of that. He just continued to laugh and laugh, completely thriving in his lunacy and enjoying every second of it.

"Ha-ha-ha-ha I wish you could see your face right now!" he eventually managed to croak through the gales of guffaw, holding himself by the belly as if trying hard to prevent it from exploding with laughter. "I thought you were gonna wet your pants!"

Finally realizing what this was all about, the two Joker's henchmen hurried to support their leader with some approving laughter of their own. As for the belittled and intimidated Connor who was still standing with hundred dollars sticking out of his mouth, afraid to do or say something, he just humbly took the banknote out and then smiled weakly at the madman's joke so as not to anger him.

When the Clown Price of Crime was finally able to recollect himself completely, he resumed his conversation with Connor, only in a more restrained manner.

"Oh dear, what happened to people nowadays?" he philosophized, primly wiping the tears of laughter from his evil, demonic eyes. "It's like nobody can appreciate a good old joke anymore! Where's everybody's sense of humor gone? Pitiful, truly pitiful..."

Then the deranged criminal put his folding knife back into his suit's pocket and summarized in his always sardonic and cynical tone,

"Well, hopefully, after what we're gonna do tonight, there will be more smiling faces around here in Gotham!"

With that, he headed along with his two lugs toward the entrance to the warehouse, leaving Connor to stand on the look-out.

Meanwhile, the Dynamic Duo who was watching all this from the rooftop of the Gotham Space museum across the street had finally seen enough. Even though they couldn't overhear the conversations from such a distance and know for sure what this gang was really up to, the mere fact that it involved the Joker gave them enough to deduce it could be nothing good.

"It's time for us to interfere," Bruce declared to his sidekick upon seeing the Joker and his thugs approach the entrance to the warehouse and then instantly reached for his Grapnel Gun.

Dick who had thought earlier before that this night was going to end up in just another crime investigation now realized what a big understatement it actually was. Any collision with the Joker always resulted in nothing less than a war. And at war, people could get hurt and even die. Therefore, the duty of both himself and Bruce was to ensure that none of that happened here tonight. Snatching at this thought, the Boy Wonder also took out his grappling device and prepared for another tough and dangerous battle.

 _[to be continued...]_


End file.
